


Till We Have Cases

by fiorinda_chancellor



Series: Till We Have Cases [1]
Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, BAMF!John, Bronze Age, Case Fic, F/F, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Godlock, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Mythical Beings and Creatures, Other, Post Reichenbach, Pre Reichenbach, Sherlock is a God, Soulmates, casefic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-24
Updated: 2016-05-14
Packaged: 2017-11-12 08:01:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 35
Words: 363,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/488558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorinda_chancellor/pseuds/fiorinda_chancellor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the post-Trojan War Bronze Age of ancient Greek myth, an enigmatic new God with a gift for deduction is sent to put a stop to the lifesaving ways of a warrior-prince with healing hands. But suddenly Prince Iaon's moved in with the Consulting God and they've started solving crimes together. And what follows after that is... most unexpected.</p><p><strong><i>Warning!</i> Contains:</strong> a lot of Greek wine, embedded casefic, explicit industrial-strength smut (starting around ch. 19), the birth of firearms discipline and other freeform but entirely justified anachronism, body parts (some still splendidly, if not magnificently, in use), and True Love tested to destruction… and final triumph.</p><p><em><strong>Last updated, May 14: </strong> </em><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/488558/chapters/15635002">Ch. 35, "Of an Overnight Stay and a House Incorrectly Named."</a> In the lavish home of the prime suspects in the ancient world's most notorious serial murders, the Consulting God and Iaon stake everything on an undercover operation that will either reveal the hidden evidence they seek, or expose them both to danger deadlier than anything they've faced before....</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PROLOGUE: Of a Princess and Prince of the Greeklands, and their Gifts: and Of a Party on Mount Olympus and What Came Of It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On Earth, the proximate cause of a disturbance in Heaven is born. In Heaven, there's a party where some of the participants talk science while drinking too much... and stuff happens.
> 
> Warning for parental expectations not being met (surprise!), nectar abuse, goddesses getting hot and bothered with each other, and a guest appearance by Mr. and Mrs. Death.

Once in the days of legend, in a small kingdom in the southern Greeklands, it came to pass that to the King and Queen of that land were born a daughter and a son. The daughter was beautiful and fair-haired, and the son golden-haired and sturdy; and as the years flowed over them and they passed through their childhood days, the time came in which each one's gifts should make themselves known, and the names of the gods to whom they would devote themselves would become plain.

The beautiful princess grew strong and tall and became a devotee of great Dionysus. All the day and late into the night she would roam the hills and woodlands with her fellow Maenads, making merry and becoming drunk with wine, frightening men and filling women with desire. And whilst the worship of the dying and reborn God of the Vine was an honourable enough way to dispose of one’s life, yet the daughter’s choice caused her royal father and mother sorrow; for they had hoped for more from her.

Their son did not grow tall, but he did grow handsome, and more golden yet; and as he grew in strength and years, it became plain that his hands had a gift of healing in them. Even when he was young, small hurt beasts would seek him out to be made well, and he would bind up their wounds and set their broken bones and wings, and care for them until they were well enough to go about their lives.  His parents began to feel sure that their son was meant to be a servant of Aesculapius. But the young prince would only shake his head. "No," he would say, and look thoughtfully at the sky, as if there was something there only he could see; "there's no god for me yet. But there will be."

There came a time when enemies moved against the little kingdom, and so along with many of his yearsmates the Prince, then grown to manhood, went to war.  He fought bravely and cleverly, for he was a keen-eyed marksman and had become skilled with the bow and the spear; and as best he could, he also healed his comrades of the wounds they suffered in battle. But there came a day in the long cruel fight when he took a spear through the shoulder, and fell among the wounded himself.

Few others in his kingdom’s army had the sort of skill at healing that the Prince did, and at first it was thought that he would die. But he survived to be sent home from the battlefield, and after some weeks he was able to rise again and go about. His wound pained him often and bitterly, and the pain of it sometimes ran so awry through his body that it even made him limp.  But the courage that had borne him through the terrors of war now bore him up through the pain of his days; and he said, "Maybe I can't heal myself, but I can still heal others."

So he did, and became ever more deeply versed in the art—partly because he understood the pain of those he healed far better now than he ever had before. He became as clever with healing herbs as he had ever been with the bow or spear, and the more sick and wounded the Prince tended, the fewer were the secrets that the human body was able to keep from him. His hands grew more gentle than ever, and his eyes grew wise, if often sad from the pain he suffered; and his fame spread far and wide.

***

At the same time, in the realm of the gods—if the concept of linear time can truly be said to apply—there came a night on which the nine Muses foregathered on Olympus from their mountains of Helicon and Parnassus, and stayed up late entertaining the gods with their sweet singing. The performance was, as always, of the very highest calibre; and the gods who heard it were moved to tears of joy and thoughts of love, as is normally the case on such occasions. And as chance would have it, after their performance Aphrodite sat down to socialize with grey-eyed Athena and several of the Muses—who were talking science at the time. But biology too is a science, and as the group became ever more giggly on the nectar of the gods, the conversation grew increasingly raunchy and explicit… and all the participants extremely, well, _aroused._ And before she went off to bed, so turned on was she by all the lovely braininess around her that great Aphrodite wound her warm and fragrant arms around every one of the Muses _and_ the normally very virginal Athena, one after another, pressed her divine charms up against theirs, and kissed every single one of them on the mouth. _With tongue._

Now, god or mortal, when one is on the receiving end of such shattering attention from the Goddess of Love herself, one must deal with the impact of such awful power _somehow._ This being the case, Athena and at least four of her half-sisters the Muses—maybe more—thereupon wound up becoming most profoundly intimate with one another (though later on they would claim that the discussion they were continuing was strictly intellectual in nature). And as a result, in the fullness of time, they bore a son.

The logistics of this parturition, while interesting, are not germane, and discussion of them would in any case be limited by EU privacy legislation. And it is also interesting to note in passing that somehow or other, flashing-eyed Athena was still a virgin at the end of the process (though it might be suggested in passing that a goddess who was born from inside a male god’s skull after he was whacked with an axe will possibly have unique opinions about what a normal pregnancy involves). At any rate, a divine child was conceived, and from the time of conception it could truly be said that few births on Olympus had ever been anticipated so keenly.

After all, when the mothers included the goddesses of half the sciences and a few of the arts, and the great Mistress of Intellect itself, the child might be expected to be something unusual; a new god was always interesting, but a smart one was an event. (Especially since Aphrodite had declared in the wake of her confabulation with the Muses and grey-eyed Athena that brainy was the new sexy). And most importantly, when the godling to be born was grandson of Zeus and Mnemosyne—of irresistible Power and infallible Memory—those influences too would be expected to breed true.

So in the fullness of time (however that works on Olympus) the new god was born, and from that very day the divine babe exceeded everyone's expectations. He was beautiful, and as he grew—which happened, as tends to be the rule where young gods are concerned, quite quickly—he became ever more so. No one in Heaven expected less, for the Muses’ loveliness was not merely in their voices, and Athena’s beauty was dazzling, if a touch on the severe side; and where the Queen of Love and Beauty herself had started the ball rolling, the child’s looks were more or less a given. The baby god was pale as ivory, and his hair (when it grew in about a day later) was his mother Urania’s, like night with starlight in it; and his eyes were his mother Athena’s, a flashing silver-grey (except when they were blue like Melpomene’s, or pale silver like Urania’s, or grey-green like Polyhymnia’s).

The new young god’s birth was celebrated with great joy on Olympus—though there was still some minor confusion, in the aftermath, over the logistical details. The only other significant confusion occurred when the ruler of Hades, the great God of Death, and Death’s dark and beautiful wife (who was Earth’s daughter and had been Spring’s maiden goddess until her marriage) inexplicably volunteered to stand up as godparents for the babe—along with the Queen of Love and Beauty, who felt a certain responsibility for events. No one had the nerve to ask Death about the whys and wherefores behind his actions. And his lovely wife merely silently smiled through the saining ceremony, bending over the cradle and letting the baby play with her long black hair, while ignoring the way Aphrodite was discreetly eyeing up her darkly handsome husband.


	2. Of the New Young God and his Career Decision

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A (relatively) newborn god establishes himself, and in the process drives his Mummies (and everyone else) a little crazy.
> 
> Warnings for intergenerational issues, misbehavior in (sort of) teenage immortals, and the abuse of unlicensed linear accelerators.

The new young god began to grow as the children of gods tend to do: with great speed. The gifts of his mind proved staggering, as everyone had expected. He was talking the day after he was born, started showing a gift for maths and chemistry the day after, was building a lab in an empty room off Hephaestus’s forge four days along, and by the end of the week had stolen Zeus’s thunderbolt to power his new linear accelerator. But these were minor disturbances compared with what was to come.

A week and a half after his birth, the young god had reached what among humans would have passed for his late teens, and had started indulging a strange new behaviour: deduction. By the end of the second week he had deduced every major god on Olympus and most of the minor ones, and had driven almost all of them to distraction—for gods tend to have a lot of secrets, and this lot was definitely no exception. The new young god knew, apparently simply by _looking,_ what Hermes had done with the tortoise. He knew why you could make Zeus twitch or fidget simply by saying the word _“Europe…”_ in the right tone of voice, or by slowly spilling out the contents of a pocketful of gold coins on the floor of Heaven in front of him (and the evil look that Hera gave her mighty husband when the young god did this was choice). He knew exactly why his mother Athena had so much trouble with spiders, and understood why the best way to get the goddess of the blushing Dawn to flee her bedroom cursing and shrieking was to put grasshoppers in her bed. He knew why Apollo was so sensitive about sunflowers and laurel trees, and why Ares the God of War hated the very sight of hairnets, and why the relentlessly chaste Goddess of the Hunt absolutely refused under any circumstances to look at the constellation Orion. And he knew all these things _without being told._ It was extremely unsettling, and it gave the gods the willies. Some blamed this annoying talent on the influence of his godparents, who also had a gift for seeing truth in even the deepest darkness, such as shrouds those silent halls of the Underworld where mortals are judged after death. But mostly, everyone wished he would just cut it the hell _out._

Finally, a few weeks after he was born, he was grown, and just about every one of the gods—including all the new young god’s mothers—was running on his or her last frayed nerve. Everyone was clear that the young god (who didn’t even have a name yet: “One will present itself in due time,” he said) needed to _get a job already_ and get out of their hair. So his mothers sat down and had a family meeting, and tried to work out what office he might best hold in the divine power structure. There is, of course, no God without a niche: each must fulfill some function or purpose for the mortals Gods serve. (If you think that mortals serve the gods, you have it badly the wrong way around. This is why the gods are usually so cranky.)

So around the end of the third week, his mothers and his slightly older half-brother Mykroft the God of Organizational Secrecy (the fruit of a one-night stand between warmongering Ares and Klio, the Muse of history) visited him on the quieter side of Olympus in the shadowy little fane or temple he had begun building for himself, the door of which was guarded by a swarm of two hundred and twenty-one golden bees (no one was quite sure why). There Athena and the Muses laid out before the young god an excellent choice of roles and employment opportunities that would suit him well in his involvement with the lives of mortals. Most of them were science- or maths-based and offered excellent opportunities for personal growth and job satisfaction.

The dark-haired young god, however, merely looked at the spread of attractive prospectuses and said, in his beautiful dark voice (which had broken around the beginning of week three), _“Dull.”_   And his mothers turned to each other, bemused; and blue-eyed Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, muttered under her breath, “Well, _that_ was a turn-up…”

But the young god simply stood up among them all and said, “Mummies, you needn’t have bothered, for I know what my job will be. I shall be the world’s first consulting deity.” And when the Muses looked at him in surprise and confusion, and Polyhymnia the Muse of Sacred Song said “But there is no such job,” their handsome son simply looked down at them out of his beautiful eyes (even for a God he was tall) and said, “There wasn't before, but there is now. I’ve just invented it myself.”  And the God of Organizational Secrecy smiled gently, seeing how useful this line of work would be. “That will do nicely,” Mykroft said, and took himself and his rain-averting staff of office away back to his own workplace; and Athena and the Muses (who knew a done deal when they saw one) went away, somewhat relieved.

And so it came to pass. From then on, when the Gods were out of their depth—which was always, since they spent most of their time dealing with mortals and were still in the process of grasping certain vital rules of the game—they would consult the brilliant young Consulting God, and matters would get sorted out. His methods were a mystery to them, and he was often abrasive and curt; but as long as they kept him well provided with problems to solve, Olympus remained fairly quiet. When he was not solving their problems, the young Consulting God spent his time in the shadowy little temple with its bee-guardians (and the goddess who managed the place for him, a mature water-nymph divorced from some foreign river god with the outlandish name of Hudson). There he spent his off hours producing weird smells and doing experiments on the laws of physics, and between times playing his bowed lyre:  and all of this became part of the routine of Olympus, and everything settled down.

Though his Mummies, and his (annoying) brother the God of Organizational Secrecy, still worried about him. _Constantly._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	3. Of the Consulting God and the Case of Death’s Problem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mrs. Death comes for a consult.
> 
> Warning for mild foreshadowing. Bet you saw this coming, though.

Now there came a long lazy afternoon (for even in that timeless time that the Gods inhabit, the hours do pass, more or less) when a knock was heard on the door of the Consulting God’s little temple; and the visitor was none other than the young God’s mighty godmother, Death’s wife. The Consulting God sprang up to greet her and offered her nectar and made her comfortable in his sitting room—or as comfortable as anyone could reasonably expect to be after someone had just been inventing hydrogen sulfide in the kitchen.

When the Queen of the Realms of the Dead had had a few moments to collect herself, she said to the Consulting God, “O my clever godson, my dread Husband, Death, has a problem: and only you, I think, are wise enough to help him.”

And the young God smiled slightly where he sat in his chair by the fire, and steepled his fingers together, and said, "Godmother, open your mind to me and tell me all."

And so she told him of a small kingdom in the Greeklands, and of the King and Queen there, and their son the healer-Prince. The death rate was becoming surprisingly low in that kingdom, and people did not sicken and die of the normal childhood diseases, especially the deadly plague—because the healer-Prince went among the people and taught them to kill the rats whose fleas bore the plague, and to that end he brought so many kittens to families in the countryside round about the palace that people said he must practically be made of them. And he set shattered bones and stitched up gaping wounds, and taught people to make healing draughts of herbs, and plasters of soothing simples that cured all kinds of ills. And with his gentle hands and his humour that flashed out even through his own pain, and with his kind words and (nearly as often) with his understanding silences, he soothed those who were hurt in mind.

Now these things, by themselves, were not a great problem. But the Gods by and large felt strongly that it was unwise for too many men to live long lives; for this is the commonest method by which men (however accidentally) grow wise.  And men who live too long, and grow too wise, start questioning the ways of Gods with men… and that’s how _real_ trouble gets started. So Death grew concerned, fearing that the loss of respect he was suffering among the mortals in that locality would mean trouble for all gods sooner or later. “He could not come to you,” said Death’s Queen, “fearing to reveal to the other Gods that this problem exists. But all know that you and I are close, so that I might visit you without drawing undue attention.”

The young Consulting God nodded and considered his godparents’ problem, and quickly found the answer. “This clever mortal must be discredited," he said. “His skill must be shown to have failed him, or to be some cunning fraud; and his power must be lost, or taken from him.  Then you and your dread spouse will soon reacquire the respect of your worshippers, and all things will be as they were.”

"And will you take care of that for him, my godson?" said Death’s fair wife.

"Great Queen of Shades," said the young God, "you may safely leave this matter with me, for the game is _on."_

And from a nearby couch he caught up a cloak of shadow with one red eye (then closed), and swept out to do some legwork.

The Consulting God did not see his godmother gazing after him as he left with a shadow of concern in her eyes; or if he did, he thought her concern of no importance. Yet the Queen of the Realms of Death had long known what her godson was perhaps too young to realize or too incautious to care about—that what fate you deal out to others, the Fates (who are more powerful than mere gods) may yet deal out to you.


	4. Of the Consulting God’s Initial Legwork, and What It Revealed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Consulting God undertakes a divine reconnaissance mission, and for the first time meets the troublesome healer-Prince.
> 
> Warnings for minor surgical procedures, (ancient) drugs references, Gods wearing disguises, and the unexpected side effects of dark blue eyes.

The Consulting God whistled up the West Wind, which does errands for the Gods, and had it bear him down to that small country in the Greeklands: specifically, to its one small city where stood the palace of the King and Queen, and where the healer-Prince lived with them. Though the Consulting God was quite confident of being able to handle this matter for his godparents with a minimum of trouble, he knew that he was first going to need to do some research. In order to successfully put an end to the healer-Prince’s meddlesome activities, he must first thoroughly understand the context in which he operated.

So to begin with, for a week or so the young God stalked about the dusty streets of the tiny city by day and night, shielded at all times from the gaze of mortals by his shadowy cloak with its single watchful red eye. Rather to his own surprise, the Consulting God found that he very greatly enjoyed this work. Everything the mortals did was interesting to him—what they ate and drank, and how they dressed and moved, and in what accents they spoke, and most particularly what they said to each other. Like the Gods, the mortals were always trying to hide what they really meant and thought about things. They were rubbish at it, at least as far as the young God was concerned, for the more they tried to hide what they truly meant, the more they revealed to him. 

Nonetheless he found them endlessly entertaining. There were so many _more_ of them than there were of the Gods, who were all he’d had to deduce until now, and with whom he was frankly starting to get bored. _I must look into this more closely,_ the young Consulting God thought. _If even so tiny a city as this, nothing but dirt streets and mud brick, is so full of lives to deduce, what would a really_ large _and well-made one be like?_ And he made a mental note, as soon as this case had been handled for his godmother, to begin the business of finding the best city in the world for such a pastime.

In the meantime, once he had what he judged an adequate feel for the tiny city, the Consulting God then turned his attention to the healer-Prince himself.  He quickly discovered from the conversation of the garrulous mortals he’d been eavesdropping on that this was not the sort of Prince who hid himself away in a palace and ordered folk about, as so many other mortal Royals seemed to be. To begin with, every morning the Prince rose early and went out about the city to check its defenses, walking its walls and looking them over with a soldier’s eye. He would make notes of where stones had come loose and where the mortar needed pointing, what gates looked a bit loose on their hinges and where the brush around the walls needed to be uprooted so no enemy could creep close under its cover. He would check the sentries’ weapons for temper and sharpness and joke with the men-at-arms at their posts, exchanging war stories with them and never failing to ask about their wives and children.

Then every afternoon, when the worst heat of the day was past, he would do one of two things. He might go out into the townlands surrounding the city to see how the local farmers were getting on—a business from which he routinely came limping home laden down with stoneware jugs of milk from their cows, or fruit preserves put up by the farmers’ grateful wives. Or else, with certain useful equipment that he had gathered together over time, he would spend the afternoon sitting just inside the city gates on a big long block of white marble which had apparently been a mounting-block for some previous height-challenged king. To that place would come people of the city who had some illness or other trouble of the body; and there the healer-Prince would treat them all patiently, one after another, until the sun went down or everyone had been seen, whichever came first.

Then when darkness had fallen he would limp back into the palace and eat and drink with his royal Father and Mother, and sometimes with his sister (assuming that she was both home and sober) before retiring to his couch. He did not as a rule sleep much, or well, so the gossip said. The city people whispered that some cruel God kept sending him ill dreams of his wounding in the war, so that he often cried out in his sleep with the pain of the wound or of his memories. And whether this was true or not, the Prince always did seem to be up well before rosy-fingered Dawn the next day, and would set about repeating the whole business again.

What was problematic about all of this, as far as the Consulting God was concerned, was that everyone seemed to _like_ this Prince. That was most unusual, in his experience. The West Wind (among its other duties) brought him news of the mortal world every day, whispering him names and deeds and the news of what men did and thought. Mostly what they thought was the worst of each other, and a lot of what they did was harm. And their opinion of their rulers was not generally a kindly one: even good rulers tend to annoy some people simply by being what they are. But not in this case. _I will need to look into this very closely indeed,_ thought the Consulting God. _For if all his people like him, he will be difficult to discredit, and few will believe any accusations of fraud._

It was now, he reckoned, time to get to grips with the mortal himself; to meet him face to face and deduce him at close range. It would be important, though, not to accidentally show any godlike attributes, or any other indicators that would introduce unnecessary variables into the equation. So the Consulting God spent some time considering what guise might suit this purpose best. And when the next afternoon rolled around on which the healer-Prince would be treating the sick folk in his city, the young God took upon himself the semblance of an old herdsman with a deep gash in his thigh, like one that might have been riven there by a tusky boar. 

It was a beautifully crafted semblance, for the Consulting God loved disguises. This one had creaking joints and grizzled hair and a stubbly beard and very disreputable raggedy clothes that smelt abominably of goats. The wound was also a work of art, being at least four inches long and an inch deep, and it was fabulously oozy and jagged and crusted. (The young God, being an incurable perfectionist, had stopped by a handy battlefield some evenings before to do a number of look-and-feel experiments on previously owned human limbs for which the souls inhabiting them, having just fled, had no further use).

The wound hurt, of course, but not _that_ much (so the young God told himself). He wouldn’t be wearing the semblance for very long, and anyway he _was_ after all a _deity_ , for pity’s sake, and the body was just transport. So, suitably attired as a poor suffering mortal, in mid-afternoon he made his hobbling way through the city gates, and soon came to the place of the white marble mounting-block and the warrior Prince with the healing hands.

The afternoon sun was westering towards evening, and the young God waited in an orderly manner behind the mortals who were also seeking the healer’s care for aches and sprains and similar minor ills. The young God could already see, as the queue grew shorter, that even though everyone here called him “our handsome young Prince”, that the healer was strictly speaking not so young, but a man in his prime, short of stature but well-made and strong. However, the Prince smiled a great deal when talking to the people he was helping, and when that smile flashed out, he looked much younger than his years. Nor, the Consulting God saw, was the healer-Prince classically beautiful, as some in the Greeklands were. Yet the lines left by the pain that had taught the Prince his wisdom somehow made his face _more_ handsome, not less. It was an interesting effect, and one the Consulting God would not previously have expected, having until now spent most of his time in a place where perfect beauty and eternal unsullied youth were the norm. _Fascinating,_ he thought, and filed the information away in the Palace of Knowledge inside his mind, to be examined later at his leisure.

Finally, it came the turn of the young God in the old man's body to be treated. As he hobbled up to the stone block where the healer sat, he was surprised at how much more trouble the transport had begun to give him over the past hour or so. It seemed to the Consulting God that the longer you spent in mortal form, the more insistent it got about its own troubles and pains. He sat down gratefully at the patient end of the mounting block, briefly shocked by how cold it was, and turned to the young healer-Prince.

Those eyes met his, and for a moment the Consulting God forgot to breathe, or indeed do anything at all. Though the Prince’s eyes, this time of day, looked tired, the blue of them was like the warm dark blue of the water that washed the Greeklands’ shores; and the kindness in them, all of it being at this moment concentrated on him alone, was deep enough to sink a trireme in.  

The young God was still having some trouble with his lungs. _Bloody transport,_ he thought, annoyed, for his heart was hammering; he could hear it in his ears. "Come on now, gaffer,” said the healer, “don’t look like that; I won’t bite you.” _Like_ what?... the Consulting God thought, confused. _What’s he seeing?_

“Budge over a bit and let’s have a look at that,” said the Prince, pausing to dip his hands into a broad brass bowl of wine that was sitting by him. The Consulting God regarded this business curiously. “It's a libation of sorts," the Prince said, holding his hands up and shaking them to let them dry in the hot air. “Some god or other likes it besides Dionysus: seems like people’s wounds heal faster when I wash up this way.” He looked at the Consulting God’s dreadfully torn thigh. “Nasty rip, that. How’d you get it?"

"Boar.” The young God was finding himself having much more trouble speaking than usual, for the longer he looked into the Prince’s kind eyes, the more he felt in danger of being drowned there.

The healer shook his head a bit, then reached out and touched the edges of the wound. And without warning the Consulting God's world whited out around him, and from somewhere or other nearby came the kind of cry of anguish one never hears in Heaven.

When the young God could see again, the healer-Prince had taken hold of him by the shoulders and was holding him up. “You all right?” he was saying.  “Wasn’t expecting a reaction like _that.”_ And the blue eyes were studying him closely.

The Consulting God shivered all over, for he had never felt pain like that before. _How do they_ stand _it?_ he thought. _But never mind that. Focus._

"Right," the healer said. "Anyway, that’s a nasty one. I’ve got to clean it out, and it’s going to need stitches. I’ll get you some milk of the poppy first.” And he started rummaging around behind the mounting-block.

"No need," the young God managed to say at last, astonished at the huskiness of his voice. "This body’s only transport."

"Maybe so, but why be cruel to it? It’s carrying a soul around inside,” said the Prince. “That’s tough enough work without making it suffer more.”  And those eyes rested in the Consulting God’s, wondering—for the God could hear it even without deducing— _What pain has he suffered that he values his body so lightly? Poor friend. I wish I could help._

A different pain, unclassifiable, thrilled through the young God at the words—one that seemed to have nothing to do with the leg. But then this transport plainly was imperfect, having been built to be so, and the Consulting God wondered what other imperfections might, in his enthusiasm to get it ready, have crept in without him noticing. “It’s all right,” he said. “I can bear it.”

“Suit yourself,” said the healer-Prince, though he sounded a bit dubious as he reached down behind him for another bowl. This one seemed to hold some kind of distillate of the grape, very clear. And while other mortals doubtless would have killed each other for a chance to drink this stuff—for the Consulting God knew that distillation technology had not yet reached the Greeklands—the healer had apparently been steeping his surgical hardware in it, along with some lengths of catgut and linen thread.  

"Wouldn't believe the crap I had to go through to get this stuff down from the Northlands," said the Prince. “Worth it, though.” Also in the basin was a little vial of glass, and he reached in and brought it up full of the clear liquid.  “Gaffer, this is going to sting something fierce. Do you want something to set your teeth into?”

The Consulting God shook his head. “I’m ready.”

The healer-Prince poured the liquid into the wound, and the Consulting God squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth and clenched his hands on the edges of the stone block he sat on. This time he didn’t quite pass out: possibly because he was distracted by the feeling of the healer’s warm, strong hand gripping one of his and giving him something to clench on.

The Consulting God felt a bit dizzy, but the two of them sat quiet for a few moments, watching the liquor work in the wound. “Why does it fizz like that?” the God said.

“Don’t know,” said the healer-Prince. “I wonder sometimes if there are evil things that get into wounds and make them go bad. Might be them dying, mightn’t it?”

The Consulting God nodded, feeling sure that this was a joke of some kind. That would certainly explain the smile that the Prince turned on him, though it was odd the way the God felt a bit more dizzy at the sight of it, and then somehow bereft when it was turned away.

“There,” said the Prince, using a piece of clean linen to soak up the liquid and dry the edges of the wound. He tossed the linen away, then reached again into the liquid in the basin again for a little narrow half-circle of shining, sharp steel—a needle. “Nice, isn’t it? This cost us half a shearing of our best sheep,” said the Prince, fishing the needle out and threading it with a long thin strand of gut that was near-invisible from having been in the liquor. “My father’s best warhorse isn’t worth as much. Though don’t tell him that.” He smiled a little at the Consulting God while his deft quick fingers finished threading the needle. Then he looked up at the Consulting God again with some concern. “…Are you _sure_ about the poppy-milk?"

"I'm sure," said the young God, squirming a bit and gritting his teeth again. The leg really did smart, but his mother Athena had told him that due to the unusual circumstances of his conception, he had potential substance issues and should lay off the milk of poppies. And as the young god knew that despite her thing about spiders his Mummy was nobody’s fool, for the time being he did as he was told, though his semblance-leg was screaming _TAKE THE DRUGS ALREADY!!_ at him.

This time the Consulting God was better prepared for the pain. All the same, as the healer-Prince began to stitch the deeper parts of the wound together, the hurt of it was like being pierced alternately with fire and ice. Yet after every few strokes of the needle, the Prince’s blue gaze came up to rest in his again, and every time it did, the pain felt less. Those eyes seemed to be saying things to him like _Please don’t be hurting too badly,_ and _It’s going to be all right,_ and _Are you okay?_ And this was before “okay” had even been invented.

It took him by surprise how quickly the Prince worked. Almost before the Consulting God knew what was happening, the healer-Prince was binding the sewn-up gash with a long strip of clean white linen which he wound around and around the thigh. He fastened the end of the strip to the bandage at the top of the binding with a clean bronze pin. “Bring that back in a week, all right?” he said. “Someone else will need it when you’re done with it.”

The Consulting God couldn’t do anything but nod as those eyes searched his again. He thought they were done, then, and was about to get up and go. But before he could move, the healer-Prince simply put his hands on top of the linen binding, and sat there for a moment with his eyes closed.

The warmth that seeped into the bandage and the wound underneath it was like the sun’s—if the sun could be in a mortal’s hands, instead of in Phoebus Apollo’s. The Consulting God found himself unable to move, as if so light a touch could pin him to the spot. All the young God could do was close his eyes and feel astonishment that anyone would spend time lavishing such kindness on mere transport. But when he opened his eyes again, those blue eyes were watching him again, thoughtful—and in their way, in their depths, they were as confused as he was. Even when Gods are disguised, some few unusual or perceptive mortals who look into their eyes will _know_ , at some level or another, what they're looking at. And in a general way the Consulting God knew what the mortal response to such vision normally was: fear, or abject adoration. But in this man’s eyes he saw no such thing. What he did see was a calm curiosity, and a sense of muted, dawning expectation—as if the mortal was somehow seeing something he had been waiting for.  

 _Impossible,_ thought the Consulting God. _Irrational. Makes no sense whatsoever._

“I’m not feeling any heat from the wound,” said the healer-Prince. “It should heal clean. Come back and see me again in a week. Is there family at home to keep an eye on you?”

The Consulting God couldn’t think of anything to do but nod, for he wasn’t sure  what was the right answer here. Did it matter if mortals had families, when they were wounded? Maybe it did. Who cared for them if they didn’t? And suddenly the question raised another one: _if there are more mortals like this, and they’re actually worth being concerned about, worth being cared for: who does that?_

 _Don’t_ we?

After a few moments the young God with the old body and the linen bandage got to his feet and managed enough words to thank the healer-Prince, who looked after him with concern as he hobbled out the city’s gates. As soon as he was sure no one was watching him, the Consulting God whirled his shadowy cloak with its one red eye around him. Hidden by it, he shrugged off and tucked away for later examination his wounded mortal semblance. Then he took himself back to Olympus, not quite knowing what to make of what had happened to him: for from the beginning to the end of the time he’d sat with the healer-Prince, he felt as if he hadn’t deduced a single useful thing.

The Consulting God returned to his little temple, giving only the barest greeting to the two hundred and twenty-one Bees (who buzzed among themselves thoughtfully as the door of the temple shut: they knew his moods, but this one was different) and to Mrs. Hudson (who needed no more than a glance to know that something unusual was going on with her young God: but she let it lie for now). He went up into his sitting room, where the fire was lit and burning for him, and sat down in his chair to the right of the hearth. There the Consulting God sat thinking for a long time with his hands steepled under his chin, and held between them, pressed close, the plain bronze pin.

Evening had fallen over Olympus, and the stars were coming out, by the time he realized he had been looking for a long time at the chair across from him, in which his Godmother had lately sat. Suddenly he now found himself imagining what it would be like to have thoughtful, dark-blue eyes resting on him from just over there.  From nowhere in particular the thought floated into his mind: _The chair is on the left side of the hearth. And the left side is where the heart lives._

Then the Consulting God shook his head and swore softly at himself, for such thoughts were completely unscientific. (The heart after all was just barely on the left, more in the middle. What silliness.) Such thoughts were symptomatic of the rankest sentiment, and he didn’t do sentiment. He was a god of solitudes and distances, of being alone. _Alone is what I have_ , he thought: _alone protects me. And I have a job to do._

The trouble was (he thought, as he reluctantly parted his hands again to look at the plain bronze pin) that he was already starting to be unwilling to do it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	5. Of the Consulting God's Plans and How They Proceeded

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Consulting God goes for a follow-up visit at the healer-Prince's clinic, and Aphrodite hosts an unusual fashion show.
> 
> Warnings for advice on wound care, clueless young Gods indulging in objectivization of mortals, and a Goddess keeping her cards very close to her chest.

The Consulting God sat quietly by the hearthfire in the sitting room of the House of the Two Hundred Twenty-One Bees, thinking. This by itself was not unusual—he spent almost all his waking hours deep in thought (and like all other Gods, the Consulting God did sleep, though far less than most). But he now realized that he’d been presented with a problem that was challenging even for him. This situation pleased and annoyed him equally. He was pleased because a truly difficult problem could keep him from being bored for days and days. But he was annoyed because the challenge inherent in the problem was due to the mortal at its root. This was unprecedented.

Mostly mortals were the tools of the Gods, or (at best) chess-pieces that they moved around the gameboard of the World at their pleasure. The only time Gods tended to get at all concerned about them were in the various cases where they’d actually sired or mothered a demigod with a mortal woman or man. _Sentiment,_ the Consulting God thought, with a slight superior smirk. But for the rest of the time, mostly the Gods did with mortals just as they pleased—exploiting them for their own needs when the mortals had something they wanted; turning them against one another in war to punish some other God’s favorites as payback for some insult or injury;  sometimes manipulating them into embarrassing or tragic situations just for amusement.

While this was unquestionably the status quo, there were moods in which the Consulting God found such behavior distasteful, and it seemed to him (when he bothered thinking about it at all) that this was probably due to the direction in which his own allegiances had begun to incline. Though the Gods didn’t much like to admit it, there were powers above even them: shadowy and deeply-founded forces like Destiny and the Fates, who could not be wheedled or threatened into compliance and who tended to rise up at odd moments to reward good behavior and punish the bad, whether one was divine or mortal.  And as the Consulting God had begun to develop his unique art and to understand the nature of the Work that meant more to him than anything else, he’d come to realize that if he served any power, it was that of Truth and her elder sister Justice, who from the silent skies above Olympus watched the Gods’ behavior just as closely as they watched the antics of mortals.

Now the Consulting God found himself wondering whether, with his promise to his Godmother, he’d inadvertently gotten himself into a conflict-of-interest situation. He’d initially thought this mortal would be easily deflected from his path. Now he wasn’t so certain. _There are still some other lines of inquiry that need investigation,_ the Consulting God thought. _Likely enough one of those will bear fruit._ But there was always the possibility that the healer-Prince might not respond to these. And then, to successfully carry out his commission, it might be necessary for the man simply to die.

 _Indeed,_ he thought _, some Gods would probably just have killed the pesky mortal already and gone on to something more interesting._ Yet his Godmother, herself Death’s Queen, seemed eager to avoid that if possible. And the more the Consulting God thought about it, the more distasteful such a prospect appeared. _Inelegant,_ the young God thought, shifting a little in his seat and stretching his long legs out before the fire. … _And a waste._

That was the crux of it, perhaps. The issue was about more than just the gift of healing the Prince clearly had in his hands, though that itself was naturally a thing of value. In the halting, stumbling manner of mortals, the healer-Prince also had a mind, and knew how to use it. He watched what went on in the world around him: he noticed cause and effect in his own craft: he experimented, and implemented results that worked. He was a scientist of sorts, and the Consulting God disliked the thought of simply doing away with even so minor a talent. _And the man’s gentle, and thoughtful; not a bad sort at all, as mortals go. It’d be a shame to have to send him down to the shades._   Almost an admission of failure.

But the Consulting God didn’t do failure. _I took the case,_ he thought. _I promised to deliver the result, and now I must perform._ And here the issue wasn’t even pleasing his Godmother—though doing so would naturally bring him a certain satisfaction. It wasn’t the boost that successfully handling this matter would give his reputation among the other Gods, when the details finally got out—though that would be enjoyable too. The real satisfaction was going to lie in finding his way through this thorny problem without compromising either his own principles or the Work. 

 _There’s some legwork to finish,_ thought the Consulting God, _and some more data to gather, that’s all. Then I’ll get this all cleaned up and move on._ And he rose from the right-hand chair, cast a cheerfully mocking glance at the empty left-hand one, and went out to start the preparations for the next stage of his plan.

***

Eight days had gone by in the Greeklands, and the healer-Prince was sitting near his city’s gate on the marble mounting-block. “All right,” he said, “who’s next?”

And then he caught a scent—well, be honest, a smell—that he remembered, and looked up with a broad smile.

“So look here,” said the Prince, “it’s Father Transport back again. Hoped I might see you today! Sit down, father, let’s have a look at that leg and see how it’s mending. Not giving you too much pain, I take it?”

“It’s been all right,” said the Consulting God. On this visit he’d taken care to make sure he didn’t slip into the semblance of the “old herdsman” until right before he was going to need it; and fortunately today’s queue of city people to be treated had been short. Now, since he’d also spent considerable time making sure the outermost layer of the semblance had gone through a week’s worth of wear and tear and soiling, he watched the Prince closely to make sure that he’d got it right.

The healer-Prince didn’t seem to see anything unusual about the bandage he’d applied a little more than a week before. Now he undid the bronze pin and tucked it away in the pouch slung from the belt of his plain pale linen tunic. After that, he  unwrapped the bandage carefully and examined the healing wound. The uppermost sewn-together surfaces were tightly sealed together, the uppermost linen threads holding it together were clean and dry, and there was no heat or redness or puffiness around the wound’s edges.

The Prince touched the wound lightly, glanced up at his patient’s face. “Need to give it a little pushing-on,” he said. “There’s a crackly noise they make when they’re not healing right, from bad stuff trapped at the bottom: want to make sure we don’t hear that. You going to be all right? Don’t want you taking a turn like the last time.”

“It’ll be fine,” the Consulting God said. He had a whole range of replies to this man all scripted out: that response was one. But after a moment, curious, he added,  “Do you always tell people what you’re doing like that, and why?”

“Try to,” the healer-Prince said, looking up into his eyes. There, of course, was that sea-blue gaze again, though somehow a little different in the day’s changeable light, for it was a bit cloudy today. And something else was there along with that apparently unfailing kindness—a thoughtful look that for some reason made the Consulting God have to resist the urge to shiver. “People who know what’s coming tend to be less frightened of it when it arrives. And this way, if you hear that or feel it yourself, in you or somebody else, you’ll know what it is and come get help. Sooner’s better for both of us, if that happens. —Ready now?”

The Consulting God nodded and steeled himself.

The healer-Prince began pressing all up and down the length of the wound. The discomfort was minor, but nonetheless the Consulting God watched this process with slight trepidation. Adding a week’s worth of workaday dirt hadn’t been the only preparation he’d made for re-donning this semblance. He’d also spent the best part of a day consulting with Aesculapius as to what difference a week’s healing time might reasonably make to a mortal’s carefully treated wound. Then he’d followed up the consult with an afternoon spent examining a representative sampling of previously-wounded mortals between Sparta and Athens (which had recently been at war yet again, and where there were plenty of subjects to choose from).

While this had unquestionably been a lot of fun, in the process the Consulting God had come to the conclusion—now doubly reinforced—that this mortal was a far better physician than these people deserved. More troubling, the young God was now forced to admit to himself that if allowed to continue working here much longer, the healer-Prince would indeed become a threat to Death’s self-respect in this region as the techniques he was pioneering started to spread. _And he’s willing to share what he knows. Unlike most mortal healers, who want to keep their secrets to themselves, and become wealthy and powerful as a result._ Bizarrely, he found himself wishing that this particular mortal was a bit _more_ selfish.

“No one would misunderstand it if you jumped a bit,” the healer-Prince was saying, completely oblivious to all this as he finished pressing his fingers up and down the healing wound. “You should have seen me when they probed my shoulder the first time, just after I got speared. They nearly had to pull me down off the ceiling of the tent.” He smiled. “Nasty business, that.”

“They didn’t do as good a job as you did with me, then,” the Consulting God said, sounding a bit gruff.

“No they did not,” said the Prince, and smiled wryly. “But you know, I lived through it. The Gods were kind to me, or I got lucky. Or a bit of both.”

“The Gods ought to be kind to you,” said the Consulting God. “You’re a kind man.” And then he was slightly surprised by what had come out of his mouth. _I really thought I had this all scripted out, why am I having so much trouble staying on script?…_ “A good man.”

The healer-Prince breathed out, at that, and his smile went a bit dry. “Well, as for kindness… maybe after you’ve seen enough people being unkind to each other, really unkind, as in killing each other… in bulk… it’s easier to be make the time to be kind.” He shrugged. “But ‘good’ covers an awful lot of ground, don’t you think? Not the kind of thing a person ought to too readily agree with. We’re all human, after all. There are always dark places in us that don’t bear close inspection. Anyway, as the general run of men goes, I doubt I’m anything special.”

It occurred to the Consulting God that this was an interesting sentiment to be coming out of someone born into a royal family. “…All right,” the healer-Prince was saying, sitting back and looking the wound over again, “I think you’re out of danger with this now. Let’s just do this—” He came up with yet another strip of clean linen and bound the thigh up again, this time simply knotting the two ends of the linen strip together atop the finished bandage when the wrapping was done. “I put a little more tension on that, feel it? It’ll give the leg more support. This time next week you can take it off. But if it gets hot, or starts feeling strange, be sure you come back.”

The Consulting God stood up, though he found himself wishing he had an excuse to stay and talk a little more; and he let himself smile. “Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome, countryman,” said the Prince. “The Gods go with you.”

The Consulting God ducked his head and headed off through the gate, noticing only in passing how the healer-Prince watched him go. _Waiting to see if anyone else is going to turn up before sundown,_ the young God thought. _Conscientious. Truly better than this place deserves. A pity he can’t be a little less so. Otherwise none of this would need to be happening…_

As soon as he was well out of sight of the gates, the Consulting God quickly brought forth his shadow-cloak and flung it about him, then shrugged off the old-herdsman semblance. It took a few moments, and seemed to take a little more trouble than last time: possibly because he was a bit distracted by the look the healer-Prince had given him. He thought again of the last time they’d sat together, and that odd flicker of seeming familiarity in the mortal’s eyes. _I wonder what he thought he was seeing.  So strange…_

_***  
_

Shortly thereafter he’d whistled up the West Wind again and had made his way back to Olympus: but not to his own temple. At his request the Wind put the Consulting God down in the shining pillared forecourt of Aphrodite’s temple-manse, high up on the mountain.

He made his way into the temple proper, as usual having to work not to wince visibly… for the goddess’s taste in furnishings was, well, unique. Every surface in the place that wasn’t covered with chryselephantine work was just plain gilded, and the Consulting God wondered (as he sometimes had before) whether Aphrodite had got some kind of quantity discount on gold from Hephaestus. Her temple-palace dripped with gold and crystal chandeliers, and was positively infested with gilt statues of buxom maidens holding torches, tasseled throw pillows, and ankle-deep white wall-to-wall carpeting.  He was intensely grateful that no one had as yet tipped her off to the possibilities of flocked wallpaper.

The Consulting God found it convenient to think of the Goddess of Love and Beauty as one of his mothers, because it saved time: though teasing out the exact nature of the role she’d played in his conception would have been interesting, the process would most likely have taken half of forever. At least tracking her down wouldn’t be too much of a problem today, because she was at home, and when she was at home, she was in the bedroom. In fact this was inevitable, since her whole temple was nothing but bedrooms of various sizes and shapes. The only question was which one she was in.

“Mummy?”  he called.

“In here, love,” he heard her call from what seemed quite a ways away.

 _The master bedroom, then._ The Consulting God proceeded to hike his way through what seemed several miles’ worth of mirrored corridors, and he it occurred to him as he went that whatever else this one of his mothers might be in doubt about, whether her bum looked big in something wouldn’t be on the list. The mirrors covered all the possible angles, and then some. “Mummy,” he called, because it was always wisest to be sure, “are you decent?”

The only answer he got was a long soft peal of that far-famed laughter—the sound that had caused any number of incautious Gods and completely helpless mortals to simply fall in love with her on the spot.  Fortunately, due to their degree of relationship  the Consulting God was immune to this effect… or had proved so thus far. He fervently hoped that matters would remain that way. For though he might mock her taste in furniture, he knew quite well that Aphrodite was one of the most powerful of all deities—able (when she was in the mood, which was frequently) to bend even great Zeus to her will. She was Love itself, dangerous and unpredictable… a chemical imbalance looking for a place to happen, and a power never, ever to be trifled with.

He finally found her lounging on a huge soft silk-draped couch (white) in the center of the huge silk-draped master bedroom (white) and gazing idly out the great floor-to-ceiling windows, which stood open on the golden afternoon. The Goddess herself was equally golden, with hair like dark amber, and she was draped today in a robe of heavy coppery silk, itself heavy with embroidery of ruddy gold at the borders.

The Consulting God made his way over to her and kissed her hello, catching a glimpse of himself in the more-than-occasional mirrors scattered around: an effect like a slice of evening’s shadow saluting warm afternoon. “Mummy,” he said, “it’s a little late to still be in bed, wouldn’t you say?”

She laughed at him again, cheerful but knowing. “You know my workday starts late,” she said. “And what are _you_ doing making fun of _my_ working hours? Cheeky monkey.”

“All right, I take it back,” he said, for there was no point in starting a squabble with her when there was business to be attended to. “I need a favor, Mummy.”

She looked at him with amused interest. “Oh really! Or maybe I should say, ‘Finally!’ Olympus’s most eligible bachelor breaks down at last. Looking for a girlfriend?”

“Girlfriend? No,” said the Consulting God, and gave her a dry, bored look. “Not really my area.”

“Boyfriend, then? …Which is fine, by the way.”

He rolled his eyes at her. “I _know_ it’s fine. …And _no,_ Mummy. I’m quite unattached to anything but the Work. And more than happy to remain so.”

She gathered her robes around her and rose from the couch, smiling gently. “Just as you say, dear. Not that it surprises me: your Mummy Athena has always been the one you’ve really taken after in that regard. The eyes do rather give it away.”

He met her eyes, which were a deep amber-brown unlike those of any of his other mothers’.  “Maybe they do,” he said then. “Meanwhile, can we please get down to business?”

“Of course, son,” said Aphrodite. “Tell me what you need.”

“I need you to show me the five most beautiful mortal women in the Greeklands.”

She gave him an amused look. “Comparison shopping, love? What exactly _is_ on your mind?”

“I’m going to be putting together a semblance,” he said. “And it needs to be one that a male mortal would find it very hard to say no to. I want to look at a sampling.”

“Well then,” Aphrodite said. “The best of the best.”

A moment later the images of five women stood before them; robed in white, statue-still as caryatids, all eyes closed. Three of them were dark-haired, one of them fair, possibly Lydian: a fifth was red-haired, Phoenician probably.  There was absolutely no question that they were all irresistibly lovely. The question now was merely which one would seem most realistic when the healer-Prince stumbled across her, and which one was likely to affect him most profoundly.

The Consulting God and his mother went to look at them more closely. “This one’s a king’s daughter, being fostered in Lycia,” Aphrodite said of the redhead as they paused before her; she opened her eyes. Deep green, like forest shadows. “A granddaughter of Poseidon’s.” They moved to the next, the fair one; deep-bosomed, narrow-waisted, with long graceful hands. She opened her eyes, and they were malt-brown. “That’s Oinops, Perseides’ daughter. Second of three princesses in one of Athens’ client kingdoms.”

The Consulting God nodded as they moved on to the third; slender, quite tall and long-limbed, the hair ebony-dark like a fall of black water. As they paused by her, her simulacrum opened its eyes. They were hazel, wavering between blue and brown, and set in a sweet round face with a little snub nose. “She’s a shepherd’s daughter from Crete,” said Aphrodite. “Her mother was a spring-nymph. Clymene’s her name.”

The young God nodded again as they paused before the fourth simulacrum. This one was short, no taller than the healer-Prince himself; dark hair again, but bound up tightly around her head in braids and soft loops, then falling down her back over softly rounded shoulders. She was small-breasted and just a little broad of hip; the effect was slightly out of proportion, but somehow very pleasing. “Doto,” said Aphrodite, “the daughter of a moneylender in Athens and his wife, an Ithacan.”

Once more the Consulting God nodded. Then they paused by the last woman. She was taller than the others, perhaps the slenderest, high-cheekboned, with a soft cloud of dark hair. “Xanthe,” said Aphrodite. “A daughter of—”

“It doesn’t matter,” said the Consulting God. “She’s the one.”

He walked around her once to memorize her looks, then smiled broadly and took the Goddess of Love and Beauty by the shoulders and kissed her soundly. “Mummy, she’s just what the doctor ordered. _Will_ have ordered. And you’re brilliant. ”

She smiled back at him. “Well,” she said, “you can’t have got it _all_ from Athena, can you?”

He whirled and headed for the way out. “Laterz, Mummy!” he called, already making plans for how to move forward. _This is all coming together quite nicely,_ he thought. _If this works, if he fails this test, it may be possible yet to spare his life..._

Had he thought to glance into one of the mirrors as he hurried out, he might have seen the look that his mother gave him as he went. It was knowing, and amused, and a little sad. But there was also a secret in it… one that curved the lips of the Goddess of Love herself into a smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	6. Of the Healer-Prince's Dream and the Beginning of his Journey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Prince experiences something different from the usual nightmare, and embarks on what will prove to be a more-than-usually-eventful business trip.
> 
> Warning for interfamilial issues, scantily clad royalty, Late Bronze Age weaponry, hot weather, and kittens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.

The Prince had privately thought for a long time that it was really a bit of a joke to call his home a palace, for he’d been in places where the royal family’s dwelling would have ranked as not much better than an outbuilding. It was, however, the only hewn-stone building in the city except for the temple of the Gods—everything else was brick—and their people insisted that it was a palace: so one got out of the habit of arguing about the name.

The Prince’s chambers were up at the back of the palace, on the river side of the building. He’d moved around to that side when he’d come home from the war, hoping that the soft constant rush of the water would help distract him from the worst of the dreams that began to assail him. It didn’t work, but he liked the sound of the water anyway, and so made no attempt to move back into the bigger crown princes’ rooms in the front. Now he sat there in near-darkness, the room lit by nothing but one plain little dish-shaped oil lamp on the table next to his couch, and the low-burning fire in the brazier near his window. The only other light came from the window itself, where high above everything the gibbous waxing Moon was dodging silverly in and out of windblown, broken clouds.

It had been a hot day, and the evening was still warm enough, even this late: so all the Prince wore now was a simple linen loin-wrap. Normally the warmth alone wouldn’t have been enough to keep him awake. His travels and his time spent on campaign in far hotter places than this had left him fairly immune to the vagaries of the weather (though like every sensible soldier he hated the mud). Something else was troubling him at the moment; a sense of something mysterious nibbling at the edges of his life—or maybe even at the edges of his soul.

In his hands the Prince held the little leather pouch that he’d earlier shed with his work tunic. Now, in the hour past midnight, he finally did the thing he’d been thinking of doing for most of the hour past. He reached into the pouch and felt around in it for the one thing left there from his afternoon’s work: the straight, plain bronze pin that the old herdsman had brought back to him. 

The Prince held it up before his eyes, looked at how the gleam of the fire in his room’s small brazier caught it. The strange thing was that the glint of firelight on the pin was _brighter_ than the fire in his brazier. _Which is impossible._

 _…And there’s another matter,_ the Prince thought as he turned the pin over in his fingers. _It’s warm._ Well, bronze usually _was_ a warmer-feeling metal than iron or steel. But about this… there was something else. It was as if hands had touched it and left it warm: as if they touched it now.

Holding the pin gave him a strange feeling that he simply couldn’t explain or describe. The Prince looked at it now, where it lay in the palm of his left hand. Not sure why he was doing this, he laid the palm of the other hand over it: pressed them together.

Warmth; an unseen glow between the hands.

He lifted the pressed-together hands up before him, then slowly settled the tips of the hands’ first fingers against his lips.  For some reason, the gesture felt familiar. He had no idea why.

The Prince sat there that way for a long while, thinking.

This last week or so, something odd had come to him. Until then his life had been going as it always went: the normal pleasures, the normal pains. A certain weariness, a certain emptiness. All entirely familiar, all nothing to be remarked upon. Even the normal dreams—the ones of the battlefield and its aftermath, when it became plain that his life as a soldier was over—came and went without more than the usual fuss.

But then, perhaps a week ago, a new dream had come to him. It came just before dawn, when dreams from the Horn Gate come—the dreams that are true. At first he hadn’t even been clear about what was happening, for there were no images in the dream; it was like lying with eyes closed. All was dark. There was warmth, though where it came from he couldn’t tell.

And then, just before the dream ended, two things happened. First, the Prince realized there was firelight near him, off to his left-hand side, close at hand: a small, warm fire burning in a little hearth. For some reason, in the dream he was so glad to see that fire and be next to it, where he somehow belonged, that tears actually sprang to his eyes. And then, as the tears welled up and blurred the firelight, something spoke in his ear, very gentle, very low. It sounded like darkness given voice, as if the night itself spoke. It spoke only one word: and that was his name.

And as so often happens when one hears one’s name called in a dream, he immediately woke up.

There the Prince had lain for long moments, befuddled, staring at the ceiling in the dark, thinking _What was_ that? And he realized that in the wake of the dream, he was gasping for breath—but not out of fear, or pain. It was joy. His heart was hammering with it.

The dream had come to him again twice since. It was getting to the point where he was actually beginning to welcome the night, and oncoming sleep, instead of (at worst) fearing them or (at best) submitting himself to them as something to be endured.  Because who knew if this strange welcoming darkness might be waiting for him again?

 _Yet I wish I knew what it meant_ , he thought. He thought of what he’d said to the old herdsman earlier: _People who know what’s coming tend to be less frightened of it when it arrives._

Somehow the Prince doubted he was going to be given much more warning of whatever was about to happen than this. The old stories where some God came down into your dream and brought you a magic golden bridle or some such along with full instructions on how to use it were just that: stories for people who weren’t clear that most mastery in the world came from figuring out the instructions yourself. Yet if nothing else could be said about it, the strange dream of darkness and fire and the voice that spoke his name made the Prince _happy._ If what the priests said about dawn-dreams was true, then something positive might be ahead of him.

But there was this too. Dreams aside, the Prince had been clear for quite some while that even good things, when they came, tended to require a lot of work to either make them at home in your life, or keep them working there. _Well,_ he thought, _at least work isn’t something I’m a stranger to._ _If I keep my wits about me, and don’t get thrown by what happens, I should do all right… the Gods helping me._

A bit reluctantly the Prince lowered his hands from the position they’d been in all this while and opened them to look at the bronze pin again. He picked it up in his fingers, turned it in the firelight, felt the lingering warmth of it: still more than should have come from his hands. Then carefully he put it away in the pouch again and tucked that away among the clothes he’d be wearing when he left town tomorrow morning.

The Prince yawned, slipped out of his loinwrap and stretched himself out on the couch, pulling the light summer throw over him. There he lay back and watched the Moon through the window until the lamp went out, the flames in the brazier died down, and sleep came for him at last.

***

The dream of fire and darkness had apparently had other plans for the evening: it didn’t come. However, neither did any others, especially not the wearyingly familiar dreams of the past’s bloody battlefields or the present’s aching shoulder. And when the Prince woke at dawn, his shoulder was behaving itself. His limp was doing what it normally did, but the arm was truly more of an issue: he was happy enough to halt a little about his daily business if the arm was all right.

It took very little time for him to throw himself together for his day’s business: long practice had established what he’d wear. The very clear early-morning sky was suggesting to the Prince’s practiced eye that it would be cooler today, so he quickly dressed in what his manservant had laid out for him the night before:  one of several identical cream-colored tunics of a supple linen canvas, very soft and well-worn—the kind of thing a field laborer or a fisherman might wear. Over that he quickly laced on a few pieces of light leather armor—breastplate and backplate and greaves and armlets, and then on his way out of his room grabbed a spear from the rack and a hard leather cap to protect him from the sun and act as a casual helmet. And last of all from the peg by the door he picked up and slung over his shoulder his bronze-studded swordbelt with his everyday shortsword hanging from it. While the Kingdom was mostly a peaceful place, it wasn’t exactly the Elysian Fields. Outlaws and criminals sometimes came wandering through the Kingdom, as did mercenaries from some neighboring war, looking for easy plunder; so there was no wisdom in going out unarmed.

He made his way downstairs, where the house-servants had started sweeping and tidying the great hall for the day, cleaning out the huge hearth down at the windowless end of the room and setting out bread and wine on the long tables so that those with work to do could break their fast. The Prince grabbed a couple of small loaves in passing and shoved them into the leather pouch he carried food in, then picked up a cup of watered wine and drank it down, nodding to the various servants as they went about their business. One of them, a grizzled older man with a limp like his but in the other leg, the Prince stopped as he went by. “Hesion, any sign of the King as yet?”

The servant shook his head. “Still not well, Prince. He didn’t sleep till late.”

The King had been suffering from a problem with his breathing since his mid-sixties; it got worse in the summer, and the Prince was still trying to work out what was causing it and how it might be healed. “All right. Tell him I’ve gone down the south road; I’ll be back before sundown. Or tell the Queen if you see her first.”

Hesion nodded and went off about his duties, and the Prince headed out through the big front doors of the hall, now thrown open to the day and any visitors who might arrive, and headed toward the gate, past the white-marble mounting block. He gazed at it a little sadly. _Must have been nice when this place had enough horses to just pull one out and ride,_ he thought. But horses didn’t do that well here without constant pampering. As a result, his father’s war horse Strix stayed home and was exercised and cared for like royalty himself, kept ready for war in case the need should unexpectedly arise. The only other horses were the matched pair who pulled the royal house’s single chariot on formal visits to other kingdoms, and they were far too valuable to risk for routine travel. There were a few mules and donkeys, but they were needed for yardwork and utility work around the palace. Princes with local business, therefore, walked.

And truly, the Prince thought, he didn’t mind it. The limp was a nuisance, but it was one he was used to dealing with: over the course of the day the pain more or less started to fade into the background. Now he started down the road that led southward into the farmlands surrounding the City, with the sun heading higher and the larks rising around him, singing, to salute it.

In about half an hour the road led the Prince through the grain fields to the first village near the City: and the first ones to meet him there—probably recognizing his irregular gait—were the usual hordes of kittens. They always came running out to meet him:  either the ones he’d brought with him on some recent trip, or else (increasingly) the children and grandchildren of the kittens of a year or two ago, now trotted out by their mothers to meet him. Shortly they would be all around him, shouting at him in Cat, demanding treats and yelling for milk (if he was carrying any, which was often the case) and generally making it hard to walk straight down the street, because they would get in between his legs and trip him. He would stop and pet them, and the village folk would come out and talk to him, and it would take an hour or so of gossip before he could get out of a given village and make it to the next one.

His goal today was a tiny village that didn’t even have a name, about fifty _stadia_ out of the city—a walk that he usually could do, barring the normal pauses for gossip, in about two hours.  It was always a pleasant walk in good weather—up and down little hills covered with heat-browned grass, through patches of deep brush that here and there in the angles of the hills gave way to little cool forest patches of olive and cypress and live oak, with the occasional spring bubbling up and trickling away downhill to meet the river that ran near the City. As he walked the Prince was able to get a sense of how well the farmers were doing this season, whether water was going to be a problem—it perennially was, here: the place had a history of recurring drought—and to check the landscape for signs of anything he should know about:  unsavory travelers, people with news from other lands, folk from his own kingdom hurrying from one place to another with news that was more local.

As he walked he looked up toward the more distant hills, the Kingdom’s southern boundaries, where the forests grew thicker and the weather would have been cooler this past week. Arêtë was probably up that way with her companions, running around worshiping the God in leopard skins and other traditional gear, waving the usual pine-cone-tipped wands, and charging hither and yon while half off her skull with wine.

The Prince sighed. He and his sister didn’t get on: never had. He supposed he could understand why. Crown princess she might have been, but the minute he’d come along, that was all over: he would inherit the Kingdom, and that was all there was to it. And if he decided to marry Arêtë off, she’d have nothing to say about it. In the meantime, possibly intent on maximizing the amount of enjoyment she could get out of life while their parents were still alive, Arêtë was happy, indeed entirely too happy, to make herself scarce most of the time while her brother managed everything of any importance. At this time of year when she returned home it was  usually to eat, complain to their parents about the Bacchantes not being respected enough in the country any more, and bitch about the quality of the small amount of wine the family managed to produce on its own lands. Then she would bugger off again. As winter drew near she would be home much more of the time, moping around, complaining about missing her friends and the free life on the hillsides, and generally making the Prince wish spring would hurry the hell up and _come_ so she would get out and they could all have some peace and quiet.

He let out a long breath, then, as the road curved around the shoulder of a hill and he saw the patch of cool woodland about two stadia ahead of him, a ten-minute walk. _There are dark places in us,_ he’d said to the old herdsman, _that don’t bear close examination._ There was one right there, a great deep shadowy one, and the Prince had never known quite what to do with it. Someday, without any question, it was going to be an issue; some day, if the Gods spared him, he’d be King and would have to decide what to do about his sister, because Arêtë couldn’t just spend the rest of her life running around in the mountains. _Not today’s problem,_ he thought, _Gods be praised._ Today he had nothing ahead of him but a long warm walk on a dodgy leg, and right now there’d be at least a little relief for him, because in the shadow of the trees the cool spring was bubbling up and waiting for him where the biggest of the old cypresses leaned over it.

The Prince breathed out with relief as he passed under the eaves of the little wood. The shade was patchy at first, under the widely-spread gangly boughs of the olives. Then it grew more solid, a deeper, cooler shade, as tall long-limbed cypresses with their thin blue-green needles crowded close to the road and blocked the sun away. Maybe ten paces off to the right, through a twisty little pathway choked with scrub olive and cypress saplings, the spring rose: a more or less kidney-shaped pool, a deep velvety brown-black in color, the surface of it trembling faintly with the water rising from beneath.

At the sight of it the Prince sighed. He leaned his spear against a tree and knelt down by the side of the pool, then leaned over the edge of the water and stroked its surface with one hand, a “hello” to the nymph of the fountain, who might or might not be at home. He wiped the wet hand across his brow, sighed again at the feel of the cool water there. Then he bent down to drink.

He’d barely wet his lips before he heard an odd sound off to his left. The Prince’s head jerked up, for it was no beast-noise: it was a human sound. He scrambled to his feet in haste, grabbed his spear again, pushed his way back out toward the road as he worked out what the sound was.

It was the voice of a woman, weeping.  

He made the road, looked down it where it bent and curved through the wood. Then he stared, and stared some more, finding it nearly impossible to get to grips with what he saw before him…


	7. Of the Prince's Meeting with an Unexpected Guest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Consulting God goes undercover again and discovers that being mortal may be more complicated than it looks.
> 
> Warnings for assorted wildlife, the use of Bronze Age weapons in self-defense, long walks, and malfunctioning transport. Also, kittens again.

The Consulting God had known that today would be a day when the Prince went out into the countryside to visit the farms and towns nearest the city. He had examined the recent history of the mortal’s walks, and deduced in a matter of seconds which one he would be taking this morning.  He’d then carefully chosen the spot where he would insert himself for maximum effect to begin his experiment.

Other preparations had taken a little more time. He’d spent a good while working on the mortal-woman semblance that he’d chosen at Aphrodite’s, fine-tuning, polishing, and adjusting it. While girlfriends might not have ever been the Consulting God’s area, he’d seen enough of the beauty of Heaven’s goddesses to appreciate the finer aspects of the subject in the abstract; so he’d added a few touches here and there to the basic model. He’d also added some routines to let the semblance do normal mortal-like things if his attention was temporarily distracted. The extra effort was all worthwhile, since when he finished this case and word got out about it—as eventually it would—the Consulting God knew no sane God would be able to accuse him of wearing something off-the-rack. Custom tailoring, as usual, was the mark of a professional.  

Now, as the Prince scrambled back up onto the road through the woods and stared down in his direction, the Consulting God knew just what the mortal would be seeing. There under the trees, all alone and hurrying toward the Prince along the dusty little road, desperate and terrified, was a young woman richly robed in indigo and murex-purple linen, slim and tall and ivory-pale. As was appropriate for the trials she would have been through, she looked distraught and disheveled, her clothes dust-smirched and rumpled, her delicate sandals scuffed and her trim ankles dirtied, her white arms bruised in places, her face flushed and tear-streaked. But she would still look like a dream strayed into daylight, and most mortal males' jaws would drop to see her.

It would take the Prince a few moments, as she got closer, to get to grips with her finer points;  the long, fine-boned face, the eyes like moonlight seen through evening’s blue mist, her softly curling hair—so deep a chestnut as to be almost black—bound close about her head with fillets of indigo silk. It was no surprise, then, that for the first few moments the Prince stood transfixed as she came.  But only for a few seconds. Then he was moving toward her, spear in hand, alert, eyes wide, intently examining either side of the road as he approached.

 _Quicker than expected,_ the Consulting God thought. _Surprising. No matter: I’m ready._ He was always careful with his experiments, and this one was no exception. Quite shortly he’d find out exactly how this Prince behaved when presented with a stunningly beautiful and completely helpless maiden all by herself out in the middle of nowhere. The experiment would be extremely interesting, and would provide the Consulting God with all kinds of useful information about the Prince. Much more would follow later: but this preliminary stage should be particularly data-rich.

“Oh, please help me,” she was gasping, “oh, thank the Gods, please, please _help me—”_ She rushed to the Prince and flung herself at his feet, threw her arms around his knees, put her face against the front of his tunic and wept bitterly.

The arms-about-the-knees posture was the formal one assumed by a suppliant asking for help in personal distress. The tears were extra, supplied by the Consulting God, who was an excellent actor when he put his mind to i _ _t_ —_which he often had to be when presenting his deduction to a council hall full of Gods all of whom had their own agendas, usually mutually exclusive ones. He had his script all ready, prepped with great care, and could hardly wait to roll it out. His eyes widened a little, though, as through the semblance’s cheek he got a sudden sense that something was going on under the Prince’s tunic.

 _Oh, my._ Definitely _quicker than expected—_

“Lady, please,” the Prince said, reaching down with his free hand to take her arm and hurriedly raising her up _—_ this being the appropriate response when one was accepting a suppliant into one’s protection. The Consulting God briefly had to concentrate on making sure that the semblance’s face didn’t reflect his amusement at how eager the Prince was to get that lovely face away from the front of his tunic below the belt.  “Please, get up! What’s happened to you?”

“We’re, we were driving from Mycenae to Corinth,” she said, “and about twenty _stadia_ up the road men came out of the woods, bandits, they attacked us.” She gulped, trying to get control. “I’m the daughter of a city councilor from Mycenae, my sister’s with child in Corinth and she asked me to come to her and my father sent me with two men at arms and some baggage. I was going to be there with her until the baby was born.” She gulped again. “It was just supposed to be a short drive, we should have been there tomorrow, we were going to stop at the palace north of here and take guest-right tonight—”

The Prince nodded, still looking around him with concern. “Of course. Who attacked you? How many were they?”

“Just a few. Three? Maybe four. But they shot one of the men-at-arms and took the other to sell as a slave. They took the horses and the chariot too, and the cart. The horses panicked when they came at us and the chariot turned over and I was thrown out. I got away into the wood, I hid, they looked for me but they couldn’t find me—” She burst out weeping again, rubbing her face with her hands and streaking her pretty cheeks more thoroughly with dust and tears.

“Lady, you’ve nothing to worry about now, I’ll see you safe to the palace,” the Prince said.  “Please, it’s all right, I’m sorry for your trouble, of course the King and Queen will help you and send you on your way—”

“Oh, _thank you,”_ she said, bursting into tears of putative relief as she took the Prince by the shoulders, and sobbing into the bad one as she once more pressed herself against him.  The Prince looked even more mortified as he tried to push her away gently and put a little air space between them, not just for the shoulder’s sake. At this he was only partly successful, as the Consulting God knew perfectly well both from the semblance’s physical feedback and the glimpses he was getting into the Prince’s mind. _Oh sweet Aphrodite_ , the Consulting God heard the Prince thinking in rueful annoyance, _I ask you, is this the moment? Not funny,_ not _funny—_ “Please, Lady, it’s going to be all right, why don’t you just—”

And then without warning the Prince broke off, his eyes going suddenly to something a little further up the road, where low brush hid the space between two tall cypresses and a third one that had fallen. There was something moving in the brush; a sudden rustling noise in the quiet, shaking the leaves of the undergrowth there.

“Just hold very still,” said the Prince, suddenly now not at all concerned about what might be going on under his tunic, because what had been ongoing a breath ago was now quite nearly gone.

And something brown and pointy pushed suddenly out of the greenery, making a sniffing noise.

“Hold quite still and don’t say anything,” the Prince said, very low, though conversationally enough. “Don’t move. Half the time they don’t want trouble, they’ll just walk away without even seeing you—”

More of the brown something came out of the greenery, sticking a blunt nose up into the air, grunting. _What?_ the Consulting God thought, half-turning.

“I really wouldn’t,” said the Prince, even more quietly, putting his free arm around her to stop her moving any more. “Please just hold still—!”

But just the sound of her linen robes rustling, in that sheltered place on a very quiet windless day, was too much. The bear’s head swung toward them;  little eyes blinked, worked for focus, the nose started sniffing again. Almost snorting now.

“Ohh—” the semblance breathed.

“Sh, sh, sh,” the Prince whispered, “really, lady, this _isn’t the time—!”_

The bear stared at them, and then began rumbling low, the growl entirely too audible in this dimness. Its head wove back and forth for a moment, and then it started shambling toward them.

The Consulting God regarded this turn of events with mild concern. _All right, this is an unexpected development, but not a big problem,_ he thought. _I’ll pack up this semblance for the moment, get the Shadowcloak around me, pick up the Prince, whistle up West Wind and get it to dump us both somewhere well out of range, a_ stadion _or so away. Then I’ll send the Prince to sleep and slip into his memories._ For of course the Consulting God was a grandson of Mnemosyne, and so had not only the gift of deleting memory—one he even used on himself when necessary to keep his mind uncluttered—but after some practice had also learned how to subvert or change a memory already in place. It took considerable work to do this to a god, but a mortal would have no resistance. _I’ll leave the Prince thinking that he’d himself walked to wherever West Wind drops us, and after that I’ll simply start the experiment again._ He smiled to himself. Mrs. Hudson would have a good laugh about this when he got back to his temple and told her about it, and the Bees would find it hilarious...

Unfortunately that was the point where the semblance of Lady Xanthe took matters into its own hands. For the first five seconds it had simply frozen as the Prince had requested. But now, as the bear got closer to them, its eyes went wide… and the semblance _shrieked_ and began to flail in the Prince’s arms, trying to flee.

The bear’s walk sped up from an amble to the early stages of a charge.   

Immediately the Prince swung around and spun the semblance away behind him, pushing her back the way he’d come. “Lady, _run!”_ he said, and turned back toward the bear, readying his spear.

The semblance, completely in agreement with this sensible suggestion, ran. The Consulting God, briefly dragged along for the ride, was very put out by this development. _Customization issues,_ he thought, and would have let out a breath of annoyance if he could have got it past the shrieking. _Did I possibly build a little too much autonomy into this semblance?_ The answer to the question just now would seem to be _Yes!_  

 _Well, never mind that now._ The Consulting God bore down hard and reasserted control, stopped the running, and then turned the semblance around and trotted it back the way they’d come. “Really, this is completely ridiculous…” he said, catching up with the astonished Prince and actually passing him. “Wait just a second—” And the God shrugged his shoulders and threw his arms wide to cast the semblance off.

Except it didn’t cast.  

The advancing bear slowed just briefly at the admittedly unusual sight of a tall slender Greek maiden inexplicably shimmying and waving her arms at it. Its first response was: _Weird. Scary. Get out of here._ But then something about the semblance’s smell got into its funny little head, replacing this sentiment with another. _Not so big. Stand up, slice it up. Eat it, maybe?_ Hmm. 

The God once more tried to shake off the semblance. But once again there was no result: the blasted thing was proving surprisingly tenacious. Granted, this semblance had been a much tighter fit than the “old herdsman” one when he got into it: rather snug around the hips. But that shouldn’t be enough to keep him _stuck_ in it. Perhaps the more time you spent in mortal semblances, the harder it was for you to get out? _Might be something to that theory,_ the God thought. _Maybe immortality_ likes _being inside mortality? Tries to settle in for a longer stay each time? Make a note..._

The semblance seized this distracted moment to try to backpedal as the bear got nearer to it. But this was a bad spot for such a maneuver, as the dirt road wasn’t entirely even. The Consulting God felt a foot go down wrong and twist under him. The semblance staggered sideways and fell, just catching itself on its wrists with a hiss of pain—

Everything now seemed to slow down strangely as the bear lumbered more quickly toward him, snarling. The Consulting God suddenly found himself forced to wonder what became of a God who died while stuck inside a mortal’s semblance. Did you have to go down to Hades and then spend hours flitting helplessly around among the shades until someone called you up before the Dark Throne for judgment and then said, “Oh wait, we’ve got a God down here by mistake”? Surely not. _Surely Godmother and Godfather would recognize me the moment I turned up._

It was an interesting question, worthy of experiment. But as the bear came hastening toward him, jaws open, slavering, it seemed like he was going to be going straight to the proof-of-concept stage on this issue—

And then his view of the bear was suddenly blocked by a cream-colored canvas tunic and a pair of brawny, high-sandalled calves, and there was a flash of bronze from before and above him, and a spear came thrusting down like golden lightning and pinned the bear down through its back and right into the dirt of the road.

The Consulting God breathed out; and then did it again, hard, and again, harder, gradually realizing that he was gasping with the semblance’s terror. Above him the Prince was turning to look down at him—

…and then, at a sound from behind, turning back to regard the bear with interest and surprise, because it had apparently not yet got the news that it should be dead. It was pushing itself up on its forelegs, ripping the spear out of the ground and rearing up again, roaring in pain and fury, with its forelegs out to catch and crush, claws out to tear—

Without a second’s hesitation the Prince whipped the sword out of his scabbard and punched it straight into the bear’s open, roaring mouth, and out the back of its head.

Wide-eyed, the bear waved its forelegs aimlessly around in the air for a moment, and then fell down on the ground like a dropped sack of grain, with the spear still halfway through it.

Both the Prince and the Consulting God in maiden’s clothing just held their positions for a moment or three, gasping for breath and getting back in charge of themselves. Then the Prince wiped his forehead, and grinned, and bent down to pull the sword out of the bear’s head. He wiped it off on the bear’s fur, sheathed it, straightened, and turned straight around to the God again, reaching down to help the semblance of Lady Xanthe up. “Lady, are you hurt?”

“I, I don’t know,” said the Consulting God, as he was now seriously off script and didn’t realistically expect to be back on it again for a while. He brushed in a somewhat scattered manner at the semblance he was wearing.

The Prince reached out to the God in maiden’s clothing and very quickly and impersonally ran his hands over his arms and wrists, feeling the bones with his fingers; then turned her around looked her up and down. “The hands seem all right. What about the feet? I saw you trip—”

“No. I mean, yes,” said the Consulting God, surprised and a little annoyed at how confusing the touch of the mortal’s hands was proving at the moment.“I mean, I’m not hurt. I’m fine.” _Unusual circumstances, that’s all. After all, you’re a God, when did you ever have to worry about being attacked by a_ bear _before? And anyway,  the transport’s reacting to him the way a mortal would. Too much drama, too much emotion, typical mortal stuff, of course the semblance finds it intense—_

“You walked straight at it,” the Prince said, taking a moment to recover his spear. Then he laughed, unbelieving. “And you told it it was _ridiculous_. Are all the women in Mycenae as brave as you?” _That being a much kinder word for it than stupid,_ the Consulting God heard him think.

At first the God was inclined to bristle. But then he thought again. _It wouldn’t be in character. And he did just save me some embarrassment in front of my Godparents.  Or… who knows… maybe worse than embarrassment. There’ve been Gods before who thought a trip to the Underworld was a simple matter. And some of them didn’t come back…_

So for the time being, the Consulting God simply fell back on smiling, which seemed to work well on the Prince: he smiled back.  “I’m sorry, lady,” he said, “in all the excitement I didn’t catch your name.”

“Xanthe,” she said, “Xanthe Peiredëidês.” And she hiccupped. And then hiccupped again, and looked annoyed.

The annoyance, the Prince was thinking, would have been about the stress, the likes of which such a gently-reared lady in normal circumstances would never have experienced in her life. In reality it was because the Consulting God had her whole pedigree ready to recite as would have been normal when a young woman of noble birth was introducing herself (or more likely being introduced) to a Prince, and now suddenly he was being thrown off by something as mundane as a respiratory dysfunction. _What is going_ on _here,_ he thought. _I checked this semblance so carefully before I put it on, why is it giving me so much trouble?_ And now he was going to have to stay in it, it looked like, for another day at least, because the Prince wasn’t going to just leave him here—that having of course been the plan. _Except the plan was made for a semblance that wasn’t suddenly having bright ideas of its own._

He hiccupped again. “It’ll pass soon,” the Prince said. “Just walk steadily for a few minutes and your breath will steady down. You wouldn’t believe how often this happens on the battlefield.”  He smiled. “Come on: the sooner we start, the sooner we’ll be at the palace. We don’t have very far to go.”

***

And truly the return to the palace didn’t take that long: but as they went it seemed to the Prince that the distance remaining to travel was getting longer by the moment, rather than shorter.  

 “Look at all the kitties!” the lady said, regarding them with interest as several of the crowd of kittens and young cats around them in the middle of the village street fell over on their little backs and started playing with the hem of her robes.

The Prince sighed, as this was only the most recent of seemingly hundreds of stops along the way. The hawks in the sky, the badgers in their setts, the otters frolicking in the streams, the hedgehogs watching them bright-eyed by the side of the road; it seemed there was very little that did not interest the Lady Xanthe.  And as for kittens, you’d think they didn’t have them at _all_ where she came from. “Ohh…”

“Yes,” the Prince said, his mind on everything else but kitties at the moment. His brain was whirring with logistics… and other things. _She’s going to need to go to Corinth so that means the chariot somebody needs to check that thing’s wheels because the weather’s been dry and the tyres might be loose then what about the horses they need to be rubbed down tonight also when were they last shoed and did the stablemaster fix those broken harness traces like I asked him to and what about food how much grain will they need to get to Corinth let’s see two hundred stadia and then there’s water plenty of that along the way but my Gods she’s lovely no forget that are you an idiot where are we going to put her I guess in Arêtë’s chambers oh Gods have they been cleaned recently is mother going to be in the hall when we get back oh please let her be there it’ll make things so much simpler—_

“Oh, look, it’s trying to eat my belt.”

“Yes, they do seem to love the tassels, don’t they….”

 _…there’s going to have to be a feast tonight too honestly who needs this right now has my good_ khiton _even come back from the fuller’s yet and are those armlets polished she really is quite lovely oh forget that you fool focus for Gods’ sake we’ll need to kill one of those sheep father’s been fattening at least some of the local council of elders will have to be there to do her honor let’s hope the word about the feast doesn’t get out to wherever Arêtë is she’s the last thing we need in the same room with this one let alone a whole crowd of hungry Bacchantes but it’s an unusual kind of beauty isn’t it rather severe almost androgynous…_

“Oh, no, little one, sucking on that won’t do you much good… oh, is this their mother? Look at that lovely fur, why don’t you come here and _OW!!”_

“Uh, sorry, _so_ sorry, they do get a little protective sometimes when the kittens are still small, here, let me see that—”

 _…and we’re going to have to have the bard too the gentlemen are going to want their bloody entertainment even if the ladies retire early is the bard even going to be sober he certainly wasn’t when I saw him yesterday sometimes I think he really takes the whole intoxication-of-poetry thing a little too seriously but yes those cheekbones and the voice does add to the effect really rather deep for a woman oh will you for Gods’ sake_ stop _it now what are you sixteen you know perfectly well there’s no point in this not to mention what kind of state is Father going to be in this evening will he be well enough to handle all this at such short notice or am I going to have to be host I hate being host at these things…_

At least the lady kept smiling all through this, though sometimes it seemed to the Prince as if she was finding everything funnier than it actually was.  _Well, the joys of travel, I guess,_ he thought. _She wouldn’t ever have been out of her own city until now, after all. Everything’s exciting when you’re somewhere new..._

They finally managed to make their escape from the village that the Prince was for a long time going to be thinking of as Cat-Scratch Fever Town—not that the Lady Xanthe seemed to be actually coming down with that, but he was starting to wish a little that she had, because it might possibly have shut her up a little. He had never in his life been asked so many questions by a grown woman, on such a number of subjects, most of which seemed to have little to do with each other.  _Stress,_ he thought. _She can’t be blamed. Far from home, suddenly away from the protection of her family, all by herself with a strange man, a little nervous, feeling the need of structuring the time somehow… Completely understandable._

But the Prince found himself reflecting, as they went on and the questions continued, that they certainly educated their young noblewomen _well_ in Mycenae. The natural sciences seemed to hold a particular fascination for her. And it wasn’t just her questions that the Prince was finding fascinating. In between them, every now and then, she would slip in answers, and they were surprising ones, about things most people would have had no reason to know. Some of them were astonishingly personal, and astonishingly accurate. She told the Prince where he’d fought by the kind of armor he wore and the marks on it. She told him to the nearest _obol_ how much his sword had cost. When they got within sight of the city walls, even at that distance she told him within a couple of years when they’d been built and where the stone had come from, and suggested who his great-great-great-grandfather had probably had to beat in single combat to get access to their quarries.

“That… was amazing,” the Prince finally had said at the end of it all – when he was more or less able to get a word in edgewise—as they came through the gates. “Have you got a seer in your family? Some kind of oracle?”

“Yes, actually,” said the Lady Xanthe, and smiled a small secretive smile.  

The Prince shook his head in wonder. _At least conversation at dinner won’t be boring,_ he thought; _that’ll make a pleasant change._

They headed for the big open doors of the palace’s great hall, and the people in the open plaza in front of the palace stared at the Prince and the beautiful young woman as they made their way in. He was holding her hand, as was traditional when one who had accepted someone as their suppliant was bringing them across the threshold for the first time.  But of course handholding meant other things as well, and inevitably there were a lot of open eyes and a lot of open mouths as they made their way up onto the podium that surrounded the building. The Prince sighed softly, knowing what kind of gossip would be flying around in here before the sun had even had time to move its own width down the sky.

Together they passed the threshold and into the shade of the hall, and the Prince squinted into the cool dimness and was immensely relieved to see what he saw there. Thank Athena and any other goddess involved, his mother was sitting down by one of the two big pillars at the hearth-end of the hall with her little hornbeam-and-ivory chair and matching side table, and on it her work basket full of softly-colored balls of wool, so that she looked for all the world like something out of Homer; the very picture of queenly domesticity.

“All right, you know what to do,” the Prince said to Lady Xanthe. “Queen Ianeira’s right there in the ivory chair: go do the formal thing with her. She and her ladies will take care of you now, and I’ll see you at dinner.”

The Lady Xanthe went gracefully down the hall toward the Queen—the Prince standing and watching her lovely gait with some admiration, for she was quite entrancing to look at from the rear—and before the Queen’s chair she dropped elegantly to her own knees and clasped his mother’s. The Queen immediately raised her up and called servants to bring their visitor a chair, and wine and food; and she shot her son a look down the length of the hall. _What have you been up to now, you naughty boy?_

He simply grinned, the grin giving her the same answer it always had: _Nothing, mother!_

And then he took himself away to hunt down the household’s steward and start handling logistics, because there were a thousand things to do before dinnertime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	8. Of a Feast at the Palace and a Fireside Chat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Consulting God (in maiden's clothing) and the healer-Prince (who scrubs up very nicely) share a meal and something a touch more intimate.
> 
> Warnings for formal dress, Bronze Age etiquette, wine-dark wine, recreational deduction, rural-bestiality jokes, unfocused romantic longings, and snogging in the first degree.
> 
>  **ETA:** now with lovely artwork by the wonderful [Archia](http://archiaart.tumblr.com) (courtesy of an anonymous reader). Thanks so much, unknown reader! And thank you, Archia, for taking so much care over such a beautiful piece of work

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.

Normally the Consulting God hated formal dinners. The food was almost always crap, the company was stultifying, and having to stand around afterwards making “serious” small talk with deities who normally couldn’t find their own arses if they had flashlights, roadmaps and GPS was boring beyond belief. The only reason he normally participated in such events was to pick up fresh data on who on Olympus was currently cheating on or backstabbing who _—_ always vital information in a smallish community where such things drove half the more criminal misbehavior in the place.

In the case of this dinner, though, he’d been prepared to make an exception. Yes, it had scored fairly high on the Barbaric Splendor index, but it had been well enough managed for all that: plenty of food, not overcooked, not bad wine at all, decent bouquet even _after_ being mixed with the sea water. Even the bard’s voice hadn’t been bad, not that he’d had his facts entirely straight—the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as it was sung here would have made at least half the God’s mothers howl with laughter. But then the man had slipped into the best of the _Homeric_ _Hymns,_ the long one to Aphrodite, and you couldn’t go wrong with Homer _—_ even the Muses were clear on _that_. So the entertainment had been all right.

…And that had been true in more than one mode, actually, because there had also been the Prince himself. Admittedly, he hadn’t looked all that impressive this morning, when he’d been dressed like a cross between a ploughman and a foot soldier. But the God hadn’t expected that on being brought down to dinner in his maiden-semblance (dressed in some extremely pretty borrowed finery belonging to the absent Princess), he would almost fail to recognize the muscular, well-proportioned and very handsome man who stood up on the King’s behalf and welcomed “her” formally with a complete recitation of her titles (he’d been talking to the bard, obviously, it was their business to know such things).

The Prince looked taller in formal dress, surprisingly so—maybe because there was no belt to break the line of the long formal _khiton;_ maybe because the colors were darker than the lighter stuff he’d been wearing during the day. The short-sleeved _khiton_ was the best and deepest shade of the true royal crimson, dark as blood. Over it was draped a light double-placketed open overrobe of heavy rough deep-orange silk, brought all the way from Ch'in if the God had correctly identified the thread count in its weft. This had been embroidered in gold with a simple walls-of-Troy zigzag that led the eye up from the embroidery at the _khiton’s_ hem to the heavy simple gold of armlets and gorget, and then to the equally simple circlet-crown of gold beaten rough, a shade or two more vivid than the ashen gold of the Prince’s hair. In this garb he looked quietly splendid and commanding, yet also much younger than his years. When he knelt on one knee, straight-backed, to greet his guest, and then rose again quite close to look just a little way up into her surprised eyes with a slight mischievous quirk of smile, the semblance’s mouth frankly went a bit dry at the nearness of him, the impact. He just kept on being more than he seemed, this one.

And when they were seated and dinner began, the Consulting God saw that he’d been right in being prepared to cut the prospect of a mortal feast some slack. Here there was none of the languid, jaded, ennui-laden tone of a dinner or nectar party on Olympus. There, a somniferous atmosphere of same-old-same-old inevitably hung over the proceedings because all the participants were immortal and had endless time to hug their grudges to themselves, and no fear of having anything really traumatic, like dying, happen to them.

Here, though, all the emotions were sharper, fiercer, brought to a point. The mortals were playing the game for real, and it had only two stages: the vital, hot, breathing world that surrounded them, and the chill pale afterlife that would be spent on the far side of the River—gray shades flitting and flowing through gray air, nothing solid to touch, no tasks to stir the mind, no deeds to do. _Boring!_ There was no question which option the mortals preferred, and they were intent on hanging onto the better one for as long as possible. They’d have all eternity with the other.

And leaving aside the generalities of the company—who were hilarious to watch eating and drinking and talking and laughing and lying and being wonderfully, transparently readable—there was the Prince who sat beside him. He wasn’t just funny, but _witty_. He was sweet with his mother, and warm with his father, and at the very least kind or amusing with everyone else, even the servants who brought the food and poured their wine. He was even rather interesting about unlikely subjects such as agriculture; soft fruit, especially when it got turned into jam, seemed to be a minor passion for him, which made the God laugh. Making _jam_ interesting had to be some kind of gift.   

And then—when the King and Queen withdrew, thus giving the signal that dinner was officially over and it’d be time for the guests to leave in an hour or so—the Prince had leaned over toward the Lady Xanthe and said something that had taken the God completely by surprise. “That thing you did on the way in,” he said in an undertone, “with the armor, and my sword, and the walls…?” He glanced around the assembled company, eating and drinking and talking all down the long tables. “Do you think you can do that here?”

“What,” the God said, “with their clothes?”

“No,” he said, “with _them!”_ The Prince smiled that slightly wicked half smile again. “Because it really was amazing.”

Xanthe’s eyes widened a little, mirroring the God’s response. “That’s not what people usually say.”

“What do they usually say?”

The God bent his head toward the Prince’s and whispered it, as it wasn’t very ladylike language and he didn’t want to break character.

The Prince had just laughed, and his amusement was so genuine that the God laughed too and simply started right in on the plentiful deductive raw material at hand. Before the hour was done the Prince knew a great deal more about his nobles and courtiers than he’d ever known or suspected, in some cases a great deal more than he _wanted_ to know, especially in one case where livestock had been involved. But in no way was his delight in what was going on dampened, and he kept saying things like “That’s brilliant!” and “What, by his _thumb?”_ and “Would you talk me through that one?” until the Consulting God was feeling unusually warm and very appreciated. 

So the evening wasn’t a total loss, not at all. Leaving aside his opinions about the Prince’s personality, which if anything were even more positive than before, certainly the Consulting God could now without any doubt whatever pronounce the object of his interest very, _very_ marriageable indeed. Now there remained only one facet to investigate: whether that solution to his case could actually be made to _work._ There did seem to be a disconnect between the Prince and his family on the subject of marriage in general; it wouldn’t have taken a God with the deductive gift to see that the Prince had no interest in it. _But now a God with that gift is exactly what he’s got to deal with… so let’s find out just_ why _he thinks he’s off the market.  If that can be fixed… then problem solved._

When it had all been over the Prince had bidden the Lady Xanthe good night, and she’d been taken upstairs to the Princess’s rooms and readied for bed by the Princess’s waiting maid, who then went to her own bed by the chamber door. Now, an hour or so later, even the latest-staying guests had long since left, the great hall’s doors had been shut, and the house had gone dark and quiet. The Consulting God had deduced exactly where the man he needed to talk to would now be: so it was time. It was a pity he couldn’t get at the Shadowcloak at the moment, but he doubted he’d need it.

Very silently the God rose from the Princess’s couch ( _no wonder she doesn’t spend much time at home, at least some of this particular family problem might have been solved if only someone had considered whether she had back trouble, probably sleeping on tree roots strikes her as a pleasant alternative to this couch, way too soft_ ), threw over herself the soft white one-piece overrobe that the waiting-maid had left for her if the night got chilly, and slipped shadow-silent past the maid’s bed ( _just a slight wobble there; the wine at dinner;_ the God didn’t normally imbibe while on cases as it slowed the deductive process, _but it couldn’t be avoided tonight, a hospitality thing. Never mind, not a real problem, all's steady now_ ). The latch ( _old “crow” variety, how quaint, they really must have a very low incidence of in-house crime here, yet more evidence of how much the staff likes the family_ ) could be made to move silently if you knew how to lift it carefully: and the Consulting God knew. Once out the door he stood silent, looking up and down the dark hallway. _No torches, no guards._ No one was going to catch him sneaking out because no one expected him to try any such thing.

He smiled in the dark. _Predictable,_ the God thought, and headed down the silent hallway. With luck he’d soon be able to make the final determination as to whether the Prince could successfully be married out into some more powerful Kingdom where there were more physicians _—_ granted, less talented ones _—_ and where his duties would no longer permit him to play the part of the gifted rustic caregiver. Success would mean he could get the man off-site and out of the danger zone, and save his life.

The God in maiden’s clothing made his way quietly toward the stairs and the faint reflection of firelight he could see against the stairway’s far wall.

***

The Prince sat in front of the fire, listening to the soft crackle of it and watching it slowly burn down, and let out a sigh of relief. Everything had gone quite well, actually. Far better than expected. Now at last he could relax. 

He usually hated royal feasts, because they were almost always political. What he particularly hated about them was when he had to stop being just “the Prince”, which he was to everybody in the city from the royal steward and Chancellor and the elders in Council, right down to the housewives on their doorsteps and the little muddy children in the streets.  At royal feasts all that ease and comfort went away. His parents stopped being just Father and Mother and suddenly became King Dasosarchos Ismenedês and Queen Ianeira. Then he in his turn was forced to become Crown Prince Iaon Dasosarchëidês, and had to dress in clothes he didn’t dare spill anything on, because silk was _expensive_ and crimson twice as much so. And then there was the heavy jewelry and the damned crown, which spent half its time trying to fall off him, and no matter how he paid attention to his posture he could always feel the bloody circlet slipping forward or backward or sideways, and the next day his back ached from having to hold himself stiff as a fireplace poker all night, not to mention how his shoulder felt from the way the change in his posture affected it…

He sighed. And then there was his mother, who inevitably used such events to remind him that if there was something they needed around the place very much, it was some more royalty. _Legitimate_ royalty. _Ah, Gods have mercy, the matchmaking. One smile, all right, two smiles at the girl, all right, let’s be honest, a whole lot more, because she’s smart and feisty and also easy on the eye, in fact incredibly more than just easy, and suddenly everyone’s eyes start lighting up and out come all the questions. And how long has your sister been married, Lady Xanthe? Oh indeed, so you’re next then. Now let me get the family straight— Oh, you’re one of the_ Argos _Peiredëiontids,_ that _side of the family, I see, they became very successful after the war, didn’t they? So well spoken-of. And has your father got anyone picked out for you yet? Really, no one yet? Is that a fact. Well, you know,_ our son…

He’d tried giving the Queen the side-eye several times at dinner, but when his royal Mum got that particular bug up her butt, there was no stopping her. Well, he tried, but she ignored him. _Oh, mother, no, please, for All Gods’ sake give it a rest, can’t you? We’ve had this conversation a hundred times._ …But there was no point in it. And they were probably up there right now in his sister’s chambers, thick as thieves and getting it all settled.  He could just see what dinner tomorrow evening was going to be like. And it would be worse because almost certainly _Arêtë_ would be on site as well; news of the leftovers of a significant feast would have spread far and wide by then. _Oh, Dionysus, just do me this one favor and distract her somehow, I’ll bring the priests a whole_ barrel _of wine, I promise. That nice one I hid in the corner of the cave where_ _Arêtë_ _won’t go because of the spiders._   _Great God of the Vine, hear my prayer!_

But whether she was there or not, it was going to be bad enough: just another version of the last time, but this time he was determined not to lose his temper. _No, Mum,_ seriously _, I_ meant _it when we talked about this before. Don’t you understand? None of them are who I’m, I don’t know,_ for— _They’re just not—_ No! _I told you ages ago that I’m not… I wasn’t—well, not_ exclusively, _not any more than anybody_ else _in the army, Mum, you know how it is on campaign, of_ course _I would have… no, there’s nobody special, Mum, it’s just that… No, there’s— Seriously, can’t we just stop having this conversation, Mother-please-will-you-JUST-LET-IT_ -GO—!

He laughed silently, ruefully, just a breath of laughter down his nose; for she _never_ let it go. It wasn’t as if there weren’t grandchildren to succeed to the throne whether he married or not. He’d sown the usual wild oats in his younger day when he was being educated, traveling between the courts of neighboring minor kings. As a king’s son, he soon found that when scratching that particular itch he could have had any girl he wanted. But that very fact had made him slow to do anything about it—so much so that other princes of his age had sometimes teased him about it.

 _Their problem,_ the Prince thought. It had since turned out for the best, for as he’d grown he found he took pride in never once having been with a woman who didn’t want him: want _him_ , not just his heritage and his prospects. And he’d taken pride too in what afterwards became his reputation among his erstwhile partners and their friends: that he was considerate and gentle, a very superior roll in the hay for someone from such a rural little Kingdom. Where children had come of such unions, they were naturally being fostered with their mothers, and were cherished—everybody wanted to be related to royalty, and you could never tell when the Heir would need a spare.

So _that_ issue was adequately handled. But what the Prince’s mother wanted (and to a less urgent degree, his father) was marriage for her son, a steady happy home life of his own.

He sighed, for right there was where everything got stuck. His mother couldn’t see that something else was needed; and he couldn’t explain what it was to her in terms she understood. Better just keep making noncommittal noises and never take any action at all, or allow it to be taken: he was the Prince, and when he said it, no meant no. _If I just didn’t have to_ keep _saying it!_ But sooner or later she’d give up—

And then the sound of a footstep up on the stairs brought his head around.

***

At the bend of the stairs where it switched back on itself, over the carved stone railing the Consulting God caught sight of the still figure down there in front of the fire, sitting in a broad-seated chair pulled up near the great wide hearthstone. His legs were stretched out easy in front of him, crossed at the ankle; the crimson of the long formal _khiton_ was glowing in the firelight like a coal, and the gorget and the gold-glinting crown had been slipped over the chair’s arm and were dangling there unregarded, casual as pots hung on a peg. The Prince was leaning on that arm of the chair with his chin resting in the palm of one hand as he gazed into the fire. The other hard-muscled, half-bare arm lay thrown across the chair’s opposite arm, half hanging down yet unconsciously graceful, eloquent of strength at rest. The flames caught in the man’s eyes and were cooled by them to a shadowy cobalt like the sea at sunset; his hair, in this light, glinted as warmly golden as the crown.

The Consulting God in maiden’s clothing took it all in, and his breath caught somewhere north of his lungs. Normally this view would have been an interesting opportunity for deduction. It seemed, however, that the lady Xanthe perceived this tableau rather differently. And frankly, at the moment the God agreed with her.

Suddenly her heartbeat seemed very loud. _His_ heartbeat. _Somebody’s._

As if hearing it, the Prince’s head turned, and he saw her.

The Consulting God started down the stairs again, very softly, and came down into the hall. The Prince rose to greet her as she came to the hearth, and for a moment they stood silent by the fire, just looking at each other.

“You shouldn’t really be down here,” the Prince said at last.

“Yet here I am,” said the Consulting God with a slight smile.

“Yes, I, uh, I see that.” He seemed to be having trouble speaking.  “Was there a problem?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

The Prince looked annoyed. “Tell me it wasn’t the sheepfold.”

“What?”

“It’s on that side of the house. The pen with the sheep in it. My sister doesn’t care about the noise, and I probably wouldn’t notice it either, you get used to it. But you’re a guest, you wouldn’t be prepared…”

“It wasn’t the sheep,” the God said, looking down at him keenly. _There’s something going on in there,_ he thought, _something behind those eyes—_

The Prince’s color heightened a little: he glanced away. Himself slightly distracted, the Consulting God glanced at the chair. “May I?”

It was the kind of broad-seated backless chair that the Etrurians called _kurule_ : there was room enough on it for two to sit side by side. He could hear the Prince thinking _: It’s not strictly proper to let her sit so close to you unchaperoned. But neither is it very proper for her to be down here by herself in the middle of the night, and you haven’t exactly been in a big hurry to tell her to go back upstairs. So now what? Are you going to make her go get another chair? Or go sit off at the table by herself, away from the fire? Not very hospitable, that. Clot._ He let out a soft breath of annoyance at himself, trying to keep it from sounding as if it was annoyance at her. _You know she’s safe with you, and you know why._ “Please.”

The God sat the semblance down and leaned her back against the opposite arm from the one the Prince had been leaning on. He reseated himself.

“So it wasn’t the sheepfold.”

“No,” she said. “I was bored.” _At least partly true._

“Did you at least have a good time at dinner?” he said.

The God smiled at him. “You know I did. Did you?”

The Prince produced that half-smile again. “With the exception of the bit with my dear mother—”

 _Yes, that’s exactly where I want to go. Talk about it and let me see what you see._ “So you might as well tell me… that way I won’t have to look at you and deduce it—”

“Oh, have mercy,” the Prince said. He started to laugh, then a second later stifled it by force before anyone should hear. “The way you did with Lord Chrysaos? Anything but that, lady. _Anything_. Oh, the poor donkey!” He actually started wheezing as he tried to keep himself quiet.

“Life in the countryside,” said the God. “There’s at least one mark on the plus side of the reckoning for living in cities. So why _aren’t_ you married by now?”

The laughter died away, though the Prince’s smile didn’t; yet some of its humor departed. “Oh please,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose like someone who felt a headache coming on.  “Not you too. You mean you and my mother _haven’t_ settled it all?”

“Actually,” said the Consulting God, “no.” The Queen _had_ indeed intended to start such a conversation, but even as stuck as he was in this semblance at the moment, the God had had no problem making her very suddenly feel inexpressibly weary the minute she got near the Princess’s chambers. And even if Queen Ianeira did manage to broach the subject with Xanthe in the morning before it was time for her to depart, it would be the work of a moment (once the God had successfully dumped the semblance) to make her forget all about the issue.

“Well,” said the Prince. “This really isn’t something I’d be discussing, normally.”

“And exactly what about all this has been normal?” the God said, the response sounding quite dry, though not without an edge of humor.

The Prince had to laugh at that. “Yes, I’d say you have a point there.”

“But anyway,” said the God, “please don’t worry, I have no intention of marrying you.”

“Well,” the Prince said, “thank you for letting me know.” And he tilted his head and looked at her a little strangely. “Just why _are_ you letting me know?”

“A number of reasons. One of them— That thing you did, with the bear. When you told me to— That was—  That was good.”

She watched the Prince studying her expression in the wake of what could reasonably have been considered a _non sequitur._ Then he smiled. “You’re welcome,” he said. “…But what else could I have done? You don’t just let the people around you die if you can do something about it. Life’s too short.”

And for mortals, it was, wasn’t it. Compared to an immortal’s, a human being’s life was like a mayfly’s: pitifully brief. They hardly had time to find anything out, do anything useful. And the dreadful brevity of their time in the world made accomplishments like the Prince’s that much more impressive. They were working against the clock all the time, never knowing when accident or disease would take them before they’d finished what they were working on.

It was starting to seem unfair that such cleverness would simply be cut off one day by the abhorréd Shears in the Fates’ hands simply because some arbitrary clock had run out of its allotted number of ticks.

“They’ve been going on at you about the succession for a while now, haven’t they,” the God said.

“Yes they have,” said the Prince.

“There are, of course, heirs awaiting legitimization,” the God said. “Several, I’d say.”

“A couple more than several,” the Prince said, gazing into the fire.  He sighed. “But it’s not enough. My father’s not really fussed. My mother, though… I’ve tried telling her but it just—”  He shook his head, a helpless gesture.

The God shook his head. “You can’t let them make you think there’s something wrong with you,” he said. “There’s not. You’re a good man.”

The Prince laughed, then. “You’re the second person to say that to me lately,” he said, amused. “I’d best be careful; I might start believing it.” Their gazes rested together for a few long moments; then the Prince sighed. 

“Of course it’d be good to have what my mother and father have,” he said. “They’re lovely together. But for some reason I just don’t think I’m destined for it. And it’s nothing to do with my wound, or my leg, or taking care of sick people, or any of that. There’s just something else calling me; I’ve known since I was small. But I don’t know what to call it, and so I don’t know how to describe it to her either. All I know is that it sets me apart. And I have to keep faith with it, or it can’t happen.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess no parent likes to hear that his or her child is different, if it’s going to make their life more difficult. But this isn’t something I can give up, or hide. Without the difference—I wouldn’t be me. So though I’d really like to make her happy…  I think the way it _is,_ is just how it has to be.”

And then the Prince laughed at himself very quietly: very ruefully. “Did that make any sense at all? We had a fair amount of wine at dinner…”

The Consulting God found himself strangely moved by what the Prince had been saying, regardless of whether the wine had been involved, and despite the trouble that sentiment gave him among both mortals and Gods. Despite having an unusual number of mothers, he had moods during which he wasn’t sure any of them were quite sure what to make of him. “It made sense to me,” he said, turning his face away. “At home I’ve got quite a large family… all as different as you can imagine, and some of them the last word in dysfunctional. Yet they see no particular irony in banding together and declaring themselves the arbiters of normalcy, and trying to get you to accept that _you’re_ the strange one. Just the constant pressure of it can start you wondering, ‘Are they possibly right, _is_ there something the matter with me’—”

And then the God _heard_ himself, and was absolutely shocked. _Since when is that something I’d say to a mortal?_ he thought. _Since when is that something I’d say to_ anybody!  

He gulped and silenced himself, intent on reassuming control. Completely at a loss, the God in maiden’s clothing shifted around uneasily to lean over forward, elbows on knees, and stared into the fire, hands interlaced, as he might have at home. _You need to salvage this situation, because you’re not done here! So make an excuse. He did, so can you._ He took a breath, he smiled as ruefully as the Prince had and said, “You may have had a point about the wine…”

After a moment the God regained enough composure to turn his head and look back at the Prince with a calmer smile. And as he did, he realized that his semblance, as tall as he, was just the height for her face to now be right on the level with the Prince’s face. Looking right _into_ that face, actually. And into those eyes—those dark blue eyes, which interestingly turned out to have some brown in them too, right around the edges, and which were returning his gaze from very close indeed—

The semblance had leaned in a bit toward the Prince: it was now a little closer. The God blinked and realized that the Prince was slowly leaning in too. And as he did, those gentle eyes, darkening now even in this firelight, were asking him a question; in fact, several questions. _Are you sure? Do you really want to? …And if you do: may I?_

The semblance was responding, leaning closer. … _Yes,_ the God thought then, _yes, absolutely why not, if it’ll get me where I need to be with this. One of my mothers was_ Aphrodite, _for pity’s sake, I know perfectly well how to kiss! …And the body certainly knows what it wants to do._

At least he _thought_ it was the body…

The God thought he was well prepared for what was coming. But the astonishing sweetness of the very first touch of the mortal’s lips, their almost shocking tenderness as they so slowly and softly pressed against his own, stroked against them, then warmly pressed again, seeking but not demanding… _oh my, this was…_ quite _unexpected. This is really rather… rather_ nice…

And it kept on being nice, in fact considerably _more_ than nice, for an indeterminate time.

After a while the Prince pulled back a little, his breath gentle against the semblance’s face. His eyes had gone heavy-lidded, dark with pleasure. “That’s…” he whispered. _Where did you learn to_ kiss _like that?_ the God heard him think. _Not a question you ask a lady;  cut it out! But_ oh— “You’re fantastic…!”

“Do you know you do that out loud?” the Consulting God said, very soft.

More color added itself to what already lay over the Prince’s cheekbones. “Uh, sorry. I’ll stop.”

“No, it’s… good.”

This time the God didn’t wait for the semblance to act, because he could sense that what he needed from the Prince was very close, just under the surface. This time _he_ leaned in first.

The sweetness resumed, if possible more intensely, and the God, now getting a little distancing back, both experienced and observed the proceedings with great interest. Of course just because he was virginal didn’t mean he didn’t know how his nethers worked. And of course even virginal gods got urges. Mostly, the Consulting God ignored his… but not always. Sometimes, admittedly, experimentation reared its head, with results that varied from the mildly intriguing to the surprisingly pleasant. Here, though, in this semblance, the mechanics were different. There was the same kind of warmth, but it pooled very differently. There was urgency, but it seemed to build more slowly, be differently distributed. Nonetheless the Consulting God gradually found himself wondering, completely hypothetically mind you, how this would feel if he were in his right shape, what it would be like if he should find himself in the vicinity of these lips, of this sweet mouth, and if its owner should possibly be interested in using it to—

 _No, stop this right now, stop stop stop, this isn’t the me I want to be doing this as…!_  

The frankly awful grammar brought him up as short as the unexpected concept. And there was another thought behind that one, far more troubling and urgent. _This is not a place you want to be going, this is a_ mortal _, you know perfectly well how much trouble this kind of thing causes, gods and mortals together like this,_ all _kinds of trouble,_ it just doesn’t work…!

He gently disengaged and drew back a bit, having some trouble getting his breath. _I am deinstalling the autonomy routines in this semblance the very_ minute _I get this thing home until I can be sure exactly which of us is doing what, I swear_ —

At that point the God realized that the Prince also had drawn back a little and was gazing into his eyes with an expression that was both sober and filled with an odd obscure yearning. “Honestly, what beautiful eyes you have,” he said, and reached up a hand to touch the semblance’s cheek, stroke the cheekbone. “You’d give a poet fits trying to describe them. What _color_ are they, even?...”

And even as his eyes held hers, to his surprise the God saw the Prince’s expression change over the course of a few seconds; grow just a bit sad. The Prince took a long breath, as if his lungs too were giving him trouble. Then he straightened, slipped his hands down to the semblance’s shoulders, and slowly, gently, put her away from him.  

The semblance’s eyes went wide as the Consulting God realized that the data he was seeking was right there, just under the surface now.   _What is that?_ _Shame?... No. Not as such. But—he feels like he’s betraying something. What?_ He went after the thought, diving into the Prince’s eyes after it as a dolphin dives into a wave.

Instantly he was caught up in a tide of blurry, flickering images; other mortals’ eyes, their hands, their bodies seen intimately, all tangled up together with this same overwhelming sense of physical warmth, this closeness. And in a second’s fleeting time the God grasped it all. Over time, as he’d grown to and into his manhood, the Prince had tasted the bodies and loves of many men and women. But slowly, over years, this had stopped. At the bottom of every one of these old memories was a kind of patient sorrow that the Prince had found for him inevitably accompanied the act of love. No matter with whom he had enacted that many-faceted rite, man or woman, in mad youth or his older years, something at the bottom of his heart had always said to him: _This is not the one. For a night, perhaps. But for forever? This isn’t the one you’re waiting for._

And (the Prince’s heart had said silently to him just now) neither was _this_ lady. He knew it just by looking at her. Yes, it was odd that something about her attracted him; something in her eyes. But what he had so long been seeking wasn’t there. _I had to try,_ his heart said: but for a long time now he hadn’t had any real hope. _I missed out somehow: got born too soon, or too late._ And without finding that indefinable something in another person, the Prince would never wed. He was in fact almost, _almost_ over being sad about it, because a different influence was working in him at the moment. Something he’d seen recently, something in dream…

 _Oh, this is terrible,_ the God thought. _It can’t be made to work after all. This is a deal-breaker, for him. And there’s no way to fool him into thinking some other mortal has this unknown quality; he barely knows what it is himself. So forget it. …Yet I wonder what this other thing is, though; this dream…_

He had no chance to get any further into that, however, for the Prince put a gentle finger under the semblance’s chin and tilted it up toward him. “No,” he said, sounding sad, but firm.

“’No’ what?” the God said, yanked unwillingly away from his search and back into the moment.

“Lady,” the Prince said. “Please listen to me.” And he sighed. “You’re very beautiful. No sane man could say otherwise. But you know the laws of hospitality as well as I do, and the Gods are rightly severe with those who flout those laws.”

“Rightly?” the God said, feeling rather cross at the moment, and not merely because he could feel his last best solution to his Godmother’s problem crumbling around him. It was also because he’d seen fellow Gods be quite severe to mortals without the question of right or wrong coming anywhere near the issue.

The Prince breathed out. “My father told me when I was little that Justice sits very high over the world. So we have to bring her closer to the people we live with and rule: the laws are the tools Themis has given us to do that. And men are so few, and scattered so widely. The laws are what hold us together, help keep us safe in the face of our… less pleasant urges. It’s a shame that sometimes they work by making people afraid of what the Gods might do to them instead of by making them want to do right: but…”

The Prince shrugged. “Xanthe, you’re a suppliant under our roof. For us to be together… _that_ way… however much we want it, it’d be wrong.  A few stolen kisses…”  He sighed, slipped his fingers up to stroke her cheek again. “That’s one thing. We’ve both had an odd day. And you’re so very lovely: it’d take a statue of stone to ignore that.” Indeed, the Prince was trying very hard to ignore one part of him which was still feeling more than half as if it was made of stone at the moment. “But more than that?” He shook his head. “It’d do violence to you, to your marriage prospects…”

The Consulting God turned his head away. “Meretricious,” he said, annoyed. “That should be _my_ choice to make. A woman should belong to herself.”

The Prince gave the semblance a wry look. “That’s what Queen Helen thought,” he said, “and look how _that_ turned out.” He sighed. “It does seem unfair. Maybe someday it’ll be different. But for today, the law of the Gods is the law of the Gods. Tomorrow we’ll put you in a chariot with a guest-gift, and send you on to your sister’s in Corinth with trusty men to guard you. You know that’s the right thing to do.”

He swallowed. “And as for right now, we should stop before we do something to each other that’ll not just be wrong, but will grieve us both later. And also people we love, who deserve better from us.”

He got up, and held out his hand to her.

Most unwilling, but unable to think of a reason to refuse that would be in character, the Consulting God took the Prince’s hand. As the semblance stood, the God had to conceal the shiver that went through her at his touch.

The Prince walked her to the stairs. “We shouldn’t speak upstairs,” he said; “sound carries too well up there. Lady, good night; and the Gods guard your dreams.” And he touched his lips to her hand, and then by that hand led her softly up the staircase.

Her quiet on the way back to the Princess’s chambers had nothing to do with sound carrying, and a great deal to do with a Consulting God once again having been surprised by a mortal, and on a level he hadn’t expected. And it wasn’t just this display of genuine virtue, either. The God didn’t normally spend much time thinking about his own loyalties to the forces above him: but plainly this mortal valued Justice and her kinswoman Truth as the Consulting God did, though admittedly on a lower and simpler level. _There are too few mortals like this around,_ he thought again.  _And it’s a pity to be meddling with the ones that we’ve got. If I were Death I’d be less concerned about this man saving too many lives, and more concerned about the good he could do by living long enough to spread around that attitude toward doing the right thing._

 _There has to be a way to save him. There_ has _to…_

The Princess’s waiting-maid took the young woman-semblance in charge, and the Consulting God allowed himself to be put to bed again with a little oil-lamp by the couch as a night light. There he lay with his hands steepled under his chin in the near-darkness, and multitasked for all he was worth.  As a matter of urgency, the uppermost levels of the God’s mind had already begun methodically turning over all the data he’d gathered so far, all his conclusions, hunting for something he’d missed, some way to both fulfill his commission and keep this mortal alive. The next layer or two down were preoccupied with plans and machinations for handling the events that would start unfolding at dawn. And a few levels further down yet, a different part of his mind—well, he _said_ mind, not suspecting that it was actually another part of him entirely—was worrying away at the grouped issues of how merely mortal eyes could seem so profoundly deep, and how they could somehow manage to be blue and slightly brown at the same time, and why he found the sorrow in them so annoying.

The God lay there in the near-darkness for a long while, his hands finally breaking away from their steepling for one to start idly stroking the back of the other—the one the Prince had kissed—while he tried to work it out. The color change undoubtedly had something to do with the interrelation between an idiosyncratic iris structure and anomalies associated with the BEY chromosomal eye-color locus. But the solution to both the sorrow and the depth issue eluded him, and kept on doing so until sleep crept up on the semblance at last, and took the Consulting God (most unwillingly) with it.

***

Downstairs, meanwhile, the Prince went down to the fireside again, to smoor the fire and retrieve the things he’d left behind. It was only when he was reaching down to unhook his crown and gorget from the arm of the chair that he realized how, without thinking about it at all, he’d pulled the chair over to the great hearth’s left-hand side.

He stood there a moment, breathed out, breathed in: then shook his head and went up to bed.


	9. Of the Consulting God’s Deduction and the Prince’s Midnight Visit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The God returns home to the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees, thinks very hard, and sends out for Chinese; while the Prince notices the weather and spills some wine.
> 
> Warnings for religious ideation, organic feta cheese, non-dubious consent, fried noodles, and scary memories. Also frogs.

Six hours later, a handsome oak-bronze-and-wicker chariot with a couple of bored-looking chestnut geldings harnessed to it was standing under a very large olive tree that overhung the road to Corinth. Also under the olive tree were a spearman and a charioteer of the Prince’s small Kingdom, lying in the shade and snoring hard.

And standing not far away from them, also in the olive’s shade, was the Consulting God, once again in his cloak of shadow with its one red eye, which was blinking a little muzzily as it looked around it, as if suddenly getting used to brighter light. In front of him the God was holding up, at long last, the newly-shed semblance, and scowling at it  furiously. It had taken him the best part of an hour to wriggle himself out of the thing, and he hadn’t been gentle with it in the process. The semblance now hung from his hands like a very ill-washed piece of laundry—flat and limp, extremely wrinkled, and giving him a somewhat reproachful look out of its now-empty eyes.

 _“No_ more long stays in the likes of _you,”_ _t_ he Consulting God muttered, and rolled the semblance up with intense relief, chucking it onto the chariot’s floor as if it was a soggy wet coat. “Transport at its very worst. Mind-body barrier almost _completely_ permeable, _serious_ impulse control issues, _never_ again!”  He’d already resolved to have a long discussion with Mummy Aphrodite about this later, and Mummy Athena too, because the two of them were infamous for spending half their time in the semblance of this old wise father figure or that beautiful youth, and _they_ never seemed to have this kind of problem. _Maybe it’s a cross-gender problem of some kind? Or an age thing? The old herdsman didn’t give me a tenth the trouble that Little Miss Xanthe did._   He shivered fastidiously. _The woman must be positively carnivorous if her semblance partakes of her personality. …Which is something else to look into. How was that even_ happening _? Surely nothing to do with my customization._

 _Well, there’s an experiment for later. …_ Yet the experience hadn’t been without its dividends, some of them interesting if peculiar. He was hoping that memories of the touch of the Prince’s lips on his would stop coming back to him at inopportune moments. _Pity he didn’t really want to be doing it…_ the God thought. _But never mind that now. To business._

He turned to the charioteer and the spearman and got busy messing with their funny little minds. It was a matter of a few minutes to use Mnemosyne’s gift on them, deleting their memories of this morning’s events (no great loss there, it had been deadly dull) and replacing them with ones of how they safely delivered the young noblewoman to Corinth, a few days’ drive away.

He was checking his work when West Wind, for whom he’d whistled nearly half an hour ago, finally showed up. “What kept you?” the God said, annoyed. “Never mind, don’t want to hear it, we’ve got a lot to do. These need to be put on ice for a few days.” He pointed at the charioteers.

The Wind made a questioning noise. The Consulting God scowled.  “No, not _literal_ ice, _do_ try to keep up, can’t you? Just take them and their horses off to Olympus and dump them in the stable with Apollo’s and Eos’s horses and all the rest of them—no one’s going to notice a couple more nags in that crowd. See to it that one of the stablehands makes sure they’re all fed and watered properly. Then they need to be put back down here in,” he glanced at his watch, “five days, got that? Good.”

He rubbed his hands together for a moment, thinking. “After that I need to schedule you for that morning, five days from now. I’m going to need to stop at the next two royal households between here and Corinth; I’ll have some memory work to do on all the people who would have seen these lads and their passenger come and go.” He grinned. The art of it was going to be to make sure that all the memories were a very close match, but not exact, since no two witnesses, divine or mortal, ever saw the same event in quite the same way. The prospect amused him immensely.

The God stood there for a moment thinking of what else might need to be done. It took a moment, as there suddenly flashed before his eyes the memory of his departure this morning—interested townspeople hanging around to watch the pretty foreign princess or whatever she was being packed up to go; the King and Queen coming out to wave her goodbye from the podium of the palace; and the eyes of the Prince, bluer than usual in the morning light, smiling at his guest as he bowed and touched her hand formally to his forehead, resident royalty bidding departing quasi-royalty goodbye. His gaze and his grip on her hand had both lasted longer than they strictly needed to, and his face had lost the late night’s slight sorrow and reacquired the warm half-smile—

 _This is going to be_ solved _,_ the Consulting God said silently. _And solved in_ his _favor._ _By Styx’s flood, I_ swear _it will._

“That’s it for now,” he said to West Wind. “Get me back home. I’ve got work to do.”

***

Within the hour he was back in the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty One Bees, with Mrs. Hudson fussing over him, the sulky semblance hung up in the wardrobe for later examination, and the Bees humming happily down by the front door now that their master was home. Their master meanwhile hung up the Shadowcloak (which, much relieved to be out from inside the semblance, now closed its eye and was soon snoring gently), changed into his silk robe and pyjama bottoms, put himself into his chair by the fire, steepled his hands, stretched out, and _thought._

He had all the data he needed now, and taken all together, it essentially turned his initial plan—to discredit the healer-Prince somehow—into complete rubbish.

The Prince, he now knew, was far too well-loved by his people ever to be denounced and driven out as some kind of evil magician whose power over disease came from a wicked source: anyone could tell at a glance that he was no such thing.  Nor could he be gotten rid of by some accusation of ulterior motives, along the lines of wanting to depose his father or some such nonsense. His people simply wouldn’t believe it. The Prince was too passionate and conscientious about his art to ever be diverted from his work as a healer by the temptations of wordly power. And his refusal to get into a marriage or even a serious relationship with anyone but some possible soulmate meant it wasn’t going to be possible to decoy him away from his art that way, either. 

So all the preferred methods of achieving the solution he’d proposed to his Godmother had now been eliminated. And the remaining, obvious solution was one the Consulting God refused to implement. _Because he’s courageous. He has tenacity._ _He’s funny, and kind. He’s accomplished. He’s got strong moral principle. And best of all, he’s clever. Not anywhere near the cleverness level of, well,_ me, _of course; who is? But he’s cleverer than most mortals. In fact, cleverer than some Gods._  

Not that that was saying a whole lot, in some cases… but still. _In any case, he’s done nothing to deserve to be sent to the shades before his time, just to keep him from disrupting the status quo_.

_If you ask me, it’s the status quo that needs disrupting._

And then the God took a deep breath, because that kind of talk might in some quarters be construed as treason.

 _Never mind. There must be another way._ Think!

After a while, the Consulting God sighed. What was strange, in a way, was that he was starting to find it difficult to contemplate this particular mortal winding up among the shades at _all._

It wasn’t that he’d have a lot of options in any case. The overwhelming majority of mortal souls wound up in the Underworld. And the only other possibility… well, only a a very few mortals would ever live or love so intensely or do such good or great deeds as to qualify for the Elysian Fields; perfect eternal youth, beautiful landscapes, the company of heroes forevermore. To the Consulting God it still sounded like a dreadful waste of time, because none of those people, extraordinary as they might have been in life, would ever do anything interesting again. Their _living_ was over.

 _Eternal bliss,_ the God thought with a roll of the eyes. _Boring._ …Though it would be better for the Prince than the alternative. But he could think of no way to guarantee  getting a mortal into Elysium.

The Consulting God folded himself up in the chair and rested his chin on his knees. _Never mind that for the moment. Right now, concentrate on keeping him alive._

So he sat, and thought, and thought some more. He lay on the sofa and thought: he got up and played the bowed lyre, and thought: he sat in his chair by the fire again with his hands steepled, and thought some more. When he looked up once during this period of intense concentration and got the fleeting impression of dark blue eyes gazing at him from the chair on the other side of the fire, he scowled and shut his eyes and thought harder still.

And Apollo stabled his horses, and holy Night covered the world, and then Apollo drove across the sky again, and once again brought the horses home; and still the Consulting God beat his brain against the problem and couldn’t see a way through.

When he once again felt dark blue eyes gazing at him, and once again looked up to see there were none there—maybe for the fourth or fifth time—the Consulting God leapt from his chair in annoyance and did something most unusual for him: he sent out for food _without_ Mrs. Hudson having to pester him about it. There was a good place down by the Embassy of the Gods of Ch’in that stayed open until the second hour past midnight; he sent one of the bigger Bees over there with a message, and about half an hour later was stuffing some kind of fried noodle dish into his face. Within the hour the God was settled back into contemplation by the fire.

He had decided to try coming at the problem from another angle. Quite often, he’d found, when you had a question for which all the available answers were proving wrong or inappropriate, sometimes it was a useful tactic to _change the question._ Recast the equation. Shuffle things around. Start plugging in new variables. Start removing old ones.

This problem was just an equation, after all. And what if someone were to merely… _remove_ one variable from the equation? Remove the most _troublesome_ variable? It was just a thought experiment, after all.

The Consulting God took a deep breath and allowed himself to consider, in depth, the solution he’d been most assiduously avoiding. _Removing the Prince from the world. Removing the Prince from Earth._

And then he blinked at his own choices of phrasing… because the two weren’t necessarily the same.

_Have I been resisting this concept so powerfully that I’ve been blinding myself to the possibilities?_

_Let’s recast the question differently. Is there a way to remove a mortal from the Earth_ besides _sending him to the Underworld?_

And about five breaths later his eyes widened, because of course there was more in the world than just the Earth and the realm of Hades. _There was another direction to move in._

“I have been _blind!_ ” he said softly. A completely feral smile split the God’s face, and downstairs by the front door the Bees burst into an absolute thunder of humming.

The Consulting God leapt out of his chair and pumped his fists in the air. _“Ganymede,”_ he yelled at the empty room. _“GANYMEDE!”_ And already the plans, the strategies, the methodology of implementation, had begun slotting themselves into place, one after another, effortless, _obvious._

“I am on _fire!”_ the God shouted, triumphant. And it wasn’t anything to do with the chilies in the noodle dish, either.

Possibly understandably, Mrs. Hudson almost immediately appeared at the top of the stairs and peered in the sitting room door. She sniffed a little and said, “Ganymede’s probably up at the Palace, dear. Have you put it out already, then?”

“What are you _—_? _Oh!”_ The Consulting God was actually feeling a little giddy with the sudden relief of having solved his problem. _Or having_ started _to solve it anyway—_  All he could think of to do at the moment was go over and grab Mrs. Hudson by the shoulders and kiss her, because he was so pleased with himself. He came away from this exercise a little damp, but that was always a hazard with river deities. “Mrs. Hudson,” he said, “I have a question for you.”

“What, dear?”

“What would you say if I told you I was thinking of taking on… a flatmate?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Well, there’s a second bedroom upstairs. If you’ll be _needing_ a second bedroom…” She looked at him thoughtfully.

His mind had already raced ahead to that issue and dealt with it. When Zeus had become smitten with the beautiful young mortal Ganymede and had turned himself into an eagle to snatch the young man up and carry him off to Olympus, it had caused significant trouble for him with the Furies; only his tremendously powerful position as King of the Gods had spared him the most painful aspects of the payback. _Consent,_ the Consulting God thought. _Consent is essential._ And there were other associated issues… but one thing at a time.

“Of course we’ll be needing the second bedroom,” the Consulting God said. And with that in mind, as for the little brush of physicality that he and the Prince had shared—obviously there could be no question at all of _that_ continuing. To offer hospitality with an ulterior motive in mind, especially _that_ one, was to breach guest-law at its very root. _But I wouldn’t_ have _such a thing in mind anyway, under normal circumstances. It was the semblance that got me into that._

 _In any case, a strict hands-off policy from the minute he steps over the threshold,_ the Consulting God thought. _It won’t be a problem; all that happened was a few stolen kisses, after all… just as he said himself. It won’t matter, because he’ll quickly forget all about that business in the face of everything else that’s going to be going on. We’ll get him settled in, and he and his gifts will be safe here until we…_

There, just for the moment—possibly because of the all the stress he’d put on it—his imagination gave out. _Until I figure out what to do next._

_But first he has to say yes._

The God had _just_ a little more legwork in prospect: fortunately West Wind would be able to handle most of it. But there was one important step that had to be taken first, and it would have to be the Prince who took it.

 _Let’s just hope he’s as clever as I think he is,_ the Consulting God thought: and he ran back to his bedroom to get dressed preparatory to whistling up the West Wind.

***

The next day, in the healer-Prince’s Kingdom, it rained frogs.

There was a certain amount of comment about this. Granted, it rained _rain_ as well, something the local farmers were more than happy with; the season had been on the dry side so far. The frogs made kind of a mess where they hit the roads, but all the local crows and other scavengers got busy, and the mess didn’t last very long.

Two days after that, it rained stones. It didn’t do this in the city, and the stones seemed almost intent on not hitting the soft fruit crops that were getting ready to be picked. But regardless of this apparent thoughtfulness, pretty much everybody still understandably found this event disturbing. 

Chief among these was the Prince, despite having long since realized that his world’s “odd” quotient was escalating. First there had been the changes in his dreams. Then there had been the Lady Xanthe, whose visit had been, to put it mildly, unusual. And now came these meteorological aberrations… on the heels of two more visits, one on each day of the strange rains, from the dream of firelight and shadow. Each time he’d awakened from the dream, just at dawn, to see each day’s peculiar rain arrive.

At first he hadn’t been sure what to do. Compared to some of his people, the Prince was not overly religious. Of course he’d been raised to know that the rulers of a kingdom had a responsibility to act on their subjects’ behalf with the Gods, which meant a certain amount of scheduled sacrifice, and formal support for the Gods’ priests. And when unusual or inexplicable things happened, it was expected that the King would act for the people then as well, to learn or interpret the Gods’ will on their behalf and see that whatever needed doing was done.

The King, though, was still not well, having taken to his bed after the feast. The illness wasn’t serious, but it distracted the Prince for a couple of days from the issue of the peculiar weather. _Possibly,_ he thought as he went about his business—the rescheduled walk to the further southern village, and another afternoon’s work seeing to the sick— _possibly it’s one of those things that the philosophers have written about: a rare natural phenomenon that men too easily confuse with the act of some God._

The next night, the dream of darkness and firelight visited him again just before dawn. And just as dawn came up, and the Prince was sitting up on his couch—just having been awakened as his name was spoken by that night-dark voice—he was gazing out his window when it suddenly began to rain blood.

Granted, it _did_ rain water later on in the day and wash the stuff away… but not before everyone in the Kingdom was shouting in terror at what the first rain might mean. And long before the second rain came, the Prince realized what was going to be required of him.

When he did, he had to sit quiet and work to command himself for the best part of half an hour, for what he was going to have to do frightened him. He was embarrassed to discover that he was _more_ scared by this than he had been when he and the thirty men he led in his last battle were going to have to go over a hill and descend into that narrow ravine-pass full of a square of angry hoplites. They had to break that square in order for the kingdom’s little mass of light cavalry to come in behind them and pass through to destroy the final force that was threatening the Kingdom; and the Prince had shaken inside his armor like a leaf in winter wind until it was time to stand up and lead his people down the other side.

It was the fight in which he’d come by the wound in his shoulder, and now that ached and throbbed and reminded the Prince that even when his only enemy had been other people, he’d almost died of it. Now, it looked like, his enemy was a god. _Some_ god or other: Heaven only knew which one. It might help to find out… but he wasn’t sure what kind of answer he’d get from any priest he asked. They knew which side their bread was oiled on, and would be most unwilling to alienate their patrons for a mortal’s sake by giving him information the gods preferred withheld.  

 _So,_ he thought, _I’m just going to have to go do this myself and see if it will be enough. I_ _always knew it might happen: it’s part of being a King. Just didn’t think it was going to happen_ now…

The Prince went home after his afternoon session of treating people out at the mounting-block and ate dinner with his mother and father up in his father’s chambers (his sister, having returned briefly in the aftermath of the feast, was off out with her fellow Maenads again). He discussed the day's events with them, and then before he left had a quiet word with his father, received his blessing, and embraced both his parents, working hard to remain in control of himself: for after all, it was still possible that nothing in particular would happen.

Then the Prince went upstairs to his chamber and called for hot water. He bathed carefully and rubbed himself with oil and donned clean linen and a clean robe; and then, when it got dark and the city went quiet, he made his way to its single temple. There were no priests about when he got there; it was past their bedtime, which had been the Prince’s reason for choosing this hour for his visit -- there was one particular priest he didn't want to know anything about this, lest he possibly get in trouble because of it.

The temple was possibly the handsomest building in the city, all white columns and a peaked roof in the modern style, carven with images of the deeds of heroes and the feats of deities. He made his way in through the open portico and finally came to stand before the twice-man-sized statue of Zeus, who was standing in for all the Gods here since the city couldn’t really afford separate temples.

The God sat there erect and massive, carved in white marble and painted to look lifelike, on a plain seat that wasn’t much different from the mounting-block by the gates, now that the Prince thought of it.  Zeus was staring out into the distance, with one arm raised and  holding the thunderbolt, and the other bracing against his seat a shield ornamented with the dead Gorgon’s head. In the dim light of the single flickering brazier that stood before the statue, the King of the Gods looked bored.

The Prince stood there a moment. _No point in putting it off,_ he thought:  _let’s get on with it._ He’d brought with him a skin of wine for sacrifice, and some of this he now spilled out in front of the altar in the usual way. He’d also brought a small sack of barley-meal and a big round of one of the local sheep’s-milk cheeses, which he put off to one side of the altar with the remnants of the wine. The priests would pick it all up in the morning.

Then he dropped to one knee in front of the statue, as he would have in front of his royal Father when about to be sent out on a mission. To the darkness, and the God immanent within it, he bowed his head in respect. Then he stood, looking up at the statue, and bent his mind on the divinity that lay above and beyond it.

“King of Gods and men,” he said after a moment, “my father is old and unwell. You know that: you’re God, after all. And pretty much everything that’s done here now is done by my order. So though the throne hasn’t yet passed to me, you know who’s responsible for things in our kingdom.”

The Prince took a long breath. “A King lives for his people,” he said. “If the Gods have some kind of problem with the way we live here, if someone’s done something wrong or offended you, tell me what the problem is, and we’ll do what we can to put it right. But please, God, don’t punish my people for it.” Dry-mouthed, he licked at his lips, swallowed; straightened his back. “Let me be their sacrifice, if one needs to be made.”

Then he stood still and waited for the thunderbolt to strike him.

Nothing happened.

 _Well,_ the Prince thought, that _might be a positive sign…_   But it was hard to tell, with gods. Sometimes they could be very patient, if they were annoyed enough, the way cats were patient at the mousehole. Even the Furies could play the waiting game, it seemed, and when that happened, things got really awful: the longer the Avengers stayed their hands, the worse the blow was when it fell.

Yet nothing continued to happen.

 _All right,_ the Prince thought. _I’ve done all I can do._ _Let’s wait and see where we go from here._

He bowed as courteously to the God’s statue as he would have to his royal Father, and left the Temple to make his way quietly to the palace, relieved that no one had heard him.

There he was wrong: for someone had.

***

And in the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees, the Consulting God, sitting by his little altar-fire with his fingers steepled, smiled in sheer pleasure, while the Bees hummed in harmony with him downstairs.

“You clever man,” the God said, shaking his head in admiration… for the mortal had just declared, in public and for the hearing of the Gods, that he was willing to bow to Heaven’s will in order to solve the problem he’d inadvertently posed. “You’ve given me _exactly_ what I needed. Almost as if you _knew_.” And he sprang out of his chair. “Now we’re almost sorted….”

The Consulting God started pacing again, speaking the message he’d composed in his mind hours back so that the West Wind could disseminate it to the Greeklands’ oracles. It started to spell itself out into the air in front of him in glowing letters. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: HEAR NOW THE IMMUTABLE WORD OF THE GODS!  YOUR SON THE PRINTS IAON— 

The Consulting God rolled his eyes and scowled at the air. “Oh, come on, _who_ turned the autocorrect back on, it’s P-R-I-N- _C-E_  for Heaven’s sake, who _writes_ these illiterate routines anyway…? _”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	10. Of the Prince’s Next Journey and Where It Brought Him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A frightening message comes to the Kingdom, and the Prince resigns himself to his fate.
> 
> Warnings for ambivalent prophetic utterance, fairy-tale angst, a family in crisis, classical architecture, and people who are heard but not seen. Also, bees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.

Not long before noon the next day, the Prince was with his father and mother in their chambers. He sat on a low cushioned stool by the couch where his father lay propped up with some pillows; nearby stood the brazier and small pot he’d been using to heat up the latest of a series of herbal concoctions to try to help his father’s persistent cough.

King Dasosarchos looked a great deal like his son, though he was half a head taller and a bit thicker in the body; he had the same ashy-fair hair, though like his son's his had a lot of premature silver in it, as did his short beard. Right now the face under that beard was working as the King made some rather energetic faces, putting aside the thick-stemmed cup his son had handed him. “I liked the one with the hot wine a lot better…” he said, and coughed. 

“You like _anything_ with hot wine in it better,” said the Queen, who was sitting on the broad windowsill that looked out into the plaza in front of the palace, and gazing out idly toward the city gates. She’d just finished washing her long salt-and-pepper hair, and was braiding it to get it out of the way.

“The question’s whether the one with the hot wine in it actually _worked_ any better,” said the Prince, and gave his father a meaningful look. “I’d spend some time being sure about this before I’m forced to move on to the one with the snails….”

His father rolled his eyes. “Don’t blame _me_ ,” the Prince said. “The tin miners swear by it, and they should know—”

“Dear,” the Queen said from the window: and her voice sounded suddenly concerned.

They both looked at her.

She was looking down at the podium that led to the doors of the great hall below. “Mikaion’s coming,” said the Queen. 

The King and the Prince looked at each other: and with a shiver the Prince saw the look of resignation settling into his eyes.

“That,” the King said, “will be the other sandal dropping.”

“Father…” The Prince swallowed hard.

The King shook his head: then looked over at the Queen, who’d left the window and come over to stand by his couch, reaching down a hand to him. He reached up, took it, squeezed it.

Within a few breaths they could all hear someone coming up the stairs nearest the King’s chambers. A few moments later the Chief Priest of the Temple paused in the doorway.

The Prince could remember when he’d been a teenager and Mikaion Lithopouridês had been a skinny junior priest only a few years older, complaining about having to clean up after particularly messy sacrifices and happily shirking that work to sit with the Prince on the Temple steps. There they’d spent many afternoons in the sun while Mikaion told him endless stories of the Gods’ great deeds—of their day-to-day battles against the monsters and evil things that still roamed the Earth in these latter days, the remaining dark children of ancient Chaos.

But now he was a long time past having time to sit and tell anyone stories. He was the Chief Priest of not just the Twelve greatest Gods, but also a crowd of minor local deities and cult heroes, all of whose festival schedules and sacrificial requirements seemed to be routinely in conflict. As a result he always looked harried, and the eyes in his round kindly face always looked tired, and the white priest’s robes always made him look twice the size he was (which in these latter years had more or less doubled). _It’s all that cheese and wine,_ the Prince thought with a sigh; _I keep telling him he needs more exercise…_

“Mikaion,” the King said, “don’t stand there holding the doorpost up. Come in, sit down…”

He did, but slowly, and sat down on the bench that had been pulled up near the King’s couch with the air of a man who would really rather not be there. “Sire,” Mikaion said, “I’ve had a messenger bird this morning from the Tenean oracle at Corinth, and another one from the temple of Apollo in Bassae. They both bore the same message, which came to the priestesses just before dawn.”

It wasn’t the King he was looking at: it was the Prince. “Miki,” the Prince said,  “you know I was in the Temple last night, don’t you.”

His friend gave him a look that was both dry and rather sad. “Saw the cheese…”

“Well, then. Apparently someone heard me.”

“Apparently so,” Mikaion said. He laced his fingers together, looked down at the floor: then looked up again. “The messages were identical within a couple of words. What they said is this: “Your son the Prince Iaon Dasosarchëidês has by his prideful and disrespectful ways given grave offense to the Gods, and he must be punished to teach the people of your Kingdom the danger of such offenses and to spare them like punishment. To atone for his ill deeds and so that his people may be held innocent of his wrongdoing, Prince Iaon must be taken by your people to that high mountain of your Kingdom which is called Aroania, and there left to await his fate; which is that he will be given as prey to a dark and terrible being whom even the Gods fear, a deadly power whose clutches cannot be eluded and from which it would be folly to attempt to escape. Let the Prince therefore within three days render himself up to the judgment of the Gods through the Dark One their servant, and the people of the Kingdom will be spared.”

His parents had made not a sound throughout this, though out of the corner of his eye the Prince had seen their clasped hands clench tighter, and tighter still.

“Well,” said the Prince after a few moments. He turned to his father. “That will certainly explain the weather we’ve been having…”

His mother’s and father’s faces were frozen: the price and habit of royalty. But his mother said very softly: “Mikaion, this is insane. You know it is. Our son has done nothing wrong. _Nothing._ ”

The Prince himself was for the moment frozen in a different way. Suddenly all he could see was the fireside, nights ago, and the lady Xanthe. _I kissed her,_ the Prince thought in sudden horror. _Is that what this is all about? I kissed a beautiful woman, and some god or other who’s a patron of her family got wind of it. And didn’t like it. And now all this has come down on us…_

He could barely express how angry he was with himself; but that wasn’t the point now. At least this fate was going to fall on _him_ , not on anyone else. But his family would be crushed. _I am the_ _stupidest man on Earth. Oh, poor Mother, poor Father. Poor_ _Ar_ _ê_ _t_ _ë_ _. And all my sick people. Who’s going to care for them now?_

 _How_ completely _I have fucked this up. For one kiss! Oh God, no more of that. No more kissing,_ ever.

And then he could have laughed at himself, except that his throat felt like it was broken. _Doesn’t sound like I’m going to have much of a chance for that anyway._

…The Prince blinked, realizing that the moments had continued passing by without him while he was standing there lost in helpless rage. “Three days,” his father said.

The priest nodded miserably.

The Prince and his mother and father all looked at each other. Then, slowly, his father got off the couch and took his mother’s hand. “Mykaion, we will withdraw for now,” said the King. “Please return this evening and we’ll make our determinations of how this shall be done.”

With great dignity, and a quietness that struck him to the heart, the King and Queen went into the King’s private chamber and shut the door, leaving the Prince and Mikaion staring at each other.  “Iaon…”

The Prince was still feeling frozen inside; but he shook his head. “Miki,” the Prince said, “don’t blame yourself for this: there’s nothing you could have done… you know that. What the Gods do, they do; the likes of us can’t change their minds. Or if we can… we can at least keep them from hurting people who haven’t done anything to deserve punishment. Maybe that’s what happened last night. On the face of it, it certainly looks that way.”

They stood together a moment, neither of them really knowing where to look. “Three days,” Miki said. “Not very long….”

“No,” said the Prince, already starting to do the times and distances in his head, wondering how much food he’d need...  _And will I need food for_ after _that third day? Is this terrible monster going to bring lunch with him, or can I just assume that I won’t be needing food afterward_ — _?_

But then amid the bizarre and broken thoughts that were jangling around in his head in the wake of the message, something suddenly struck the Prince as strange. “Miki—”

His friend looked at him oddly.

“You said the oracles’ pronouncements were identical within a couple of words….?”

“Uh, wha—? Oh. Oh, yes. Yes. Here…” Mikaion felt around in his belt pouch for something: came out with a couple of scraps of parchment, each small enough to fit into the message pellet on a pigeon’s ankle.

“See that,” Miki said as they bent their heads together over the scraps. “It’s a translation thing. You know how the dialect is down in Bassae, all those old Peloponnese words are stuck in it…”  He pointed at one of the scraps. “See there, in that last sentence. Instead of it being ‘folly to try to escape’, it says—” He squinted at the parchment. “‘Completely ridiculous to try to escape…’”  Mykaion sighed and shook his head sadly. “Doesn’t do much to alter what you’re going to have to do…”

“No,” the Prince said. “No, it doesn’t…” He laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘Miki, can you make some time for me this evening? There’s going to be a lot to put in order before I… go.” 

Mykaion nodded. He reached out to take his friend by the arm, and just held him that way for a moment; then turned, hanging his head, and went out.

The Prince stood there for a few breaths’ time, just holding still, trying to find some kind of balance in a world which had suddenly been knocked completely askew. Yet at the same time, those two words were doing something strange in his head. At first they were just a whisper. _Completely ridiculous._ But then more clear: _This is completely ridiculous._

And his comment afterwards, quite clear in memory: “You told it it was _ridiculous_ —”

No other living being had heard those words except him and the one who had uttered them.

_I wonder._

_Could it possibly be_ —

He went to the door to his father’s chamber, tapped on it: went in.

His mother and father were sitting together on the large couch they shared, his father’s hands clasping his mother’s; and the tears were already running down their faces. Hurriedly the Prince went to sit there, clasped his hands together with theirs.

“Mother,” he said, “Father… I’ve just thought of something.”

They looked at him in complete confusion.

“This is going to sound completely mad…” The Prince shook his head, not even sure how to phrase this. “But what we just heard, what’s going to happen to me—  I think… I think it might not be all bad.”

Both of them stared at him as if he was out of his mind. “Son—” his father said.

“Father, no,” the Prince said, and squeezed his hands. “My wits aren’t unseated, please believe me. I mean, I know this is horrible, but I still can’t—I don’t dare tell you what I think is going on. I think it might… I don’t know… might be dangerous for even _you_ to know what I suspect is going on. But hidden in that message… is _another_ message, somehow. One that’s meant for me. But it’s meant for me secretly. And what it’s telling me is that—” He had to pause for a moment then, because he wasn’t quite sure how to phrase this. “That this isn’t entirely what it looks like. That somehow there’s hope:  that whatever’s going to happen to me, I’m not going to die of it.”

“Son,” his mother said, “how can you be sure?”

He laughed, his laughter unavoidably harsh with the shock. “Sure? I can’t be, yet. But, Mother, it’s a _chance_ at least.”

“Is this something to do with whatever passed between you and the God last night?” said the King.

The Prince shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said softly. “It might be. It might be something else entirely. But that doesn’t change what I think I’ve seen.”

They both opened their mouths at once, but the Prince shook his head. “No,” he said, “don’t ask me. I’m not going to tell you. I don’t know why, but I feel in my heart that this needs to be kept secret. And when I go—” He looked away from his mother’s face: the way it started to change when he said the words, he couldn’t bear it— “I think we need to behave as if we all believe I’m going to my death. I don’t think we should share this secret, this hope, with anyone else.”

“Arêtë?” his mother said after a moment, not looking up.

The Prince sucked in a sad breath, let it out.

“No,” his father said.

The Queen looked at him.

“No, dear,” said the King. “What Arêtë knows, her fellow Bacchantes will know five minutes later, and the rest of the Kingdom would know very soon. She was never any good with secrets. This needs to stay with us.”

They all looked at each other: and without words, agreed.

The Prince glanced down then, having a thought that he hoped was not showing in his eyes. _However forlorn this hope is,_ he thought, _whether it proves true or not: I intend to let them hang onto it. It’s better to live in hope, even the merest scrap of it, than for them to know for sure that I’m dead or gone forever._

“And in the meantime…” his mother said.

The Prince looked into their eyes with sorrow. “We pray and sacrifice,” he said, “and we obey the will of the Gods… and see what follows after.”

***

Three days later, almost to the hour, the Prince stood alone atop a mountain cliff, looking down the valley at the funeral procession— _his_ funeral procession—as it made its way slowly back toward the city.

 _That’s not something a man gets to see every day,_ he thought.

He stood there in what he wore when he’d last gone to war. Partly this had been a matter of pride, a kind of statement on his part. _If I’m to die today, I’ll go as I would have gone in battle. I am a Prince, and though my hands heal, I’m a warrior; and this panoply and honor is mine by right to wear, no matter what any God’s oracle says. I fought as well as I could. I spared what enemies I could. I killed cleanly, and treated my captives with the honor due their rank and with what courtesy is due all conquered opponents. However I may have offended you, Gods, it wasn’t_ that _way!_ And he nodded once, briefly, as he would have when accepting an order from his Father or one of his generals, as he’d done himself when knowing an order was accepted by someone he commanded: _So._

If fighting was needed, he was as ready as he could be for what might come. He had his sword and spear and his long shield, and the heavier armor that he’d worn into serious battle, bronze plates riveted to leather; nothing Hephaestus would have wanted to take credit for, but decent hardwearing kit for a soldier. Even if he had no chance of winning against whatever dark thing might be coming for him—even if (as he half expected) he was supposed to surrender to it in order to complete the sacrifice—at least it would have no doubts, on looking at him, as to whether he was used to giving up without a fight.

So now there was nothing to do but wait. He had, in a strange way, feared this moment—feared how he would be when there was no one watching him any more and he could safely allow his feelings to show in his face and manner again.  This was partly because he knew his family and everyone around him was watching him, in pity, in grief, horrified for his sake; and he knew that if they saw him break down under the pressure, if they saw his own misery or uncertainty show in his face, their own pain would be made all that much worse. No healer willingly caused pain, any more than a good warrior caused more than he needed to; so the Prince had been rigidly guarding his face and the way he moved since Miki had come to see him and his parents three mornings ago.

Now the Prince breathed out and waited for it all to come rushing in on him, everything he’d been holding at arm’s length: his fear, his own pain at his world ending, his grief for his family and all the other people who were concerned for him.  But it didn’t.

 _It may take a while,_ he thought as he stood there, trying to be sensible about it. But there may have been something else involved: the other reason he’d been so intent on keeping his real feelings out of his face. One of them that had started creeping into his heart over the past day would have been so impossible to express or explain to anyone else that he’d been terrified it would show.

He was excited. He’d actually found himself becoming _excited_ about what was going to happen to him.

The first night after hearing the prophecy had been bad. Sleep had come only in scraps and patches, and once or twice tears of anger at the unfairness of the gods’ accusation against him, or misery for his parents and his sister, came to sting his eyes. That night what dreams came were tattered things, snatches of images, strange moments from childhood, half-forgotten moments: games, scraps of song, laughter, a sentence here or there from stories his mother had told him, or other stories heard later from Mikaion. When he finally rose that morning, worn out, he thought: _It’s my heart telling me, The warp and weft of your world is in tatters: your old life is done._

That day had been such a whirlwind of unhappy preparation that when its end came he’d had no time for anything but the blank dark collapse of exhaustion when he finally fell down onto his couch near midnight. But then, near dawn, the dream of firelight and shadow visited itself upon the Prince with such vivid intensity that when he woke in his own couch, in his own room, he felt somehow disconnected from reality: as if his body was someplace it shouldn’t be, didn’t belong any more. For nearly an hour after arising he moved through his own house as if _it_ was the dream. Nothing seemed solid.  The Prince remembered having been in a state like that for some days after he realized that his wound was not just some bad dream, but something that was going to change his life forever. That disconnected feeling had passed: but it had been strange then, and was stranger now.

That was the day they had to set out for the mountain. It hadn’t been a big party; Miki and a few priests to conduct a sacrifice, his parents and Arêtë, some of the city’s Elders; with mules to carry supplies, a few tents to rest in on the way. It had all been terribly strained, all voices lowered, everybody afraid to look at him but unable not to. And his family… He had no idea how they were holding it together, except that he was sure they were as terrified of revealing their grief to him as he was of letting them see how he was feeling. In particular, Arêtë was so strange toward him. Suddenly he was her baby brother again, as he hadn’t been for who knew how many years now. It was touching, and painful, and he didn’t know how to bear it. He had tried to show her the affection he hadn’t been able to for so long, as if all the intervening years of tension and pain between them hadn’t happened. But it didn’t really work all that well… partly because this strange excitement was already beginning to rise in him. He was putting utmost compulsion on himself to keep anyone from seeing it, but particularly his mother and father and certainly his sister, because none of them would understand it at all.

And then, too soon, Mount Aroania had risen up before them. The party climbed a little ways up the mountainside, not too far, to a cliffside spot where people came sometimes to sacrifice to the mountain nymphs and the naiads of the source of their river (for that was nearby). Prayers were said, and sacrifices made: and then came the final farewells. Against the pain of those, even the excitement had no power, no ability to ease the agony: not in the slightest.

But now—there was his family, going away from him in grief, leaving him to who knew what fate. And here he was, standing on the mountainside: and the bizarre excitement was rising again. The Prince felt like some kind of traitor, but the excitement didn’t care. What it had to say to him was, _Whatever else you’ve been or done in your life, you have now fallen into the matter of legend. You will be a tale, now: probably a cautionary one. But still some fireside will hear your story, of the healer-prince who was sacrificed for offending the Gods, and went to his death honorably: better than nothing, as legends go._

And he laughed a little through the pain. _Probably,_ the Prince thought,   _somebody’ll come along ten years or fifty from now, or a hundred, and turn this into some great battle against dark forces. Whereas the truth of it is…_

There he stopped, because now that he was on the brink of it, he simply had no idea.

The Prince looked down the valley one more time. But now there was no sign of any human being there. In the moment of reverie, what might have been his last glimpse of his old life had slipped around the curve of the hill and left him alone in the great silence of the mountains, with nothing to do now but wait.

 _At least,_ he thought, with a quirk of half-smile, _it’s not raining._ …Funny how strange and stretched that simple movement made his face feel. To smile was the thing he hadn’t dared do for three days now. It felt almost illegal.

He looked around him. _No giant terrible dark monster yet._ The sun was bright:  white clouds moved gently in a hard blue sky: the wind blew, and not even very hard. The wind was in the west, that gentlest of summer winds, which men called Zephyr. And despite the breeze, the sun was getting hot.

 _At least there’s a tree to sit under_ , the Prince thought. There was a big olive up against the back of the broad cliff-platform where he’d taken his stance, like a shelf standing out against the mountainside. He looked over the landscape one last time for any sign of approaching dark monsters, but could see nothing but the shadows moving over the neighboring hillsides, and everything silent and still.

He let out a long breath. “Well,” he said, “damned if I’m going to wait standing up. When something shows up, I’ll stand up to meet it _then.”_

And the Prince went and sat with his back up against the broad trunk of the olive tree, and stretched his legs out, and sighed.

And waited.

After a little while more he took his helmet off, because it was more comfortable to lean against the tree without it. He put it down beside him, idly poked the horsehair crest to make it wiggle, and then leaned his head back against the tree with a sigh: and yawned. Last night had been spent in the tents, on thin blankets and pads on the ground, and he hadn’t slept well at all: his body had slipped too easily away from the hard lessons it’d learned while campaigning, and forgotten how to get comfortable quickly on the ground.

Now, though, the aches and pains were feeling a little more remote, possibly washed away somewhat for the moment by the sheer stress of the final farewells. _Thank God that’s all over,_ the Prince thought, just a little guiltily; for the fear of what the last moments with his family would be like had been worse than anything else. The relief of having that done with was immense. He felt as if some great weight had been lifted from him, which was simply ridiculous when you thought about it, as now he was probably about to die.

 _Ridiculous,_ _though,_ he thought, and closed his eyes as he leaned against the tree. Completely _ridiculous._

He wondered if those words really were going to mean anything, now; or whether he had been deluding himself, and happy to use that self-delusion to try to spare his parents a little pain.

 _Well, we’ll soon find out, I guess._ And a breath of ironic laughter escaped him. _Listen to me: ‘we’. I wonder who ‘we’ is._

The warm wind stroked through his hair and ruffled it, a pleasant sensation. The Prince breathed out into the wind with odd enjoyment, feeling as if they were connected somehow: a side effect, he supposed, of the way all his senses had been heightened today, as had happened to him often in wartime when a battle was imminent. Everything seemed very immediate, intense.  But at the moment the edge was coming off the sensitivity a little, leaving him more able to enjoy the day.   _If you’ve got to die,_ he thought wearily, and a bit irrationally, _I guess it’s good to have a nice day for it._

He started to doze off: caught himself at it when he nodded, then leaned against the tree again and sighed. _If something comes, I’ll hear it all right._ When he was traveling or out in the open, he could still trust his soldierly habits to alert him. _But I am just so tired…_

The shade was pleasant, the air was warm, everything was quiet; peaceful. _The last peace I’ll ever have, maybe. So why not enjoy it._ And the next time he felt himself starting to doze, he just sighed again and let it happen.  

***

A few times as he slept, some sound crept in through the odd dreamless peace of it; a bird’s chirping in the tree above him; the start-again-stop-again buzz of an early locust, responding to the day’s growing heat; then silence again for a while. And after that came a strange half-conscious time when he thought someone had picked him up and was carrying him somewhere. At first he thought it was his father: another of those odd fragmented memories he’d been having the last day or so, a childhood moment, himself maybe four or five years old?—or even six, or seven?—and strong arms around him, his father picking him up from beside the warm fireside and carrying him upstairs, putting him to sleep in his own room, his own bed. The sensation was utterly unalarming: he relaxed into it.

What was different about this memory, this moment, was the rushing noise. Again the Prince thought he was hearing the sound of the river behind his room, that slow constant rush and purl of water against the broad banks and the few stones that had been rolled down with the current during stormy weather. In any case, hearing it was a comfort, and in the half-dreaming-half-waking state once again the sound got tangled up with some thought or feeling of physical movement, like being rocked on water, or on air, if air could hold you and rock you, warm as arms.

After a while the Prince realized that he was awake again, and there was warmth outside his closed eyelids, and bright light. He didn’t open his eyes for a few moments. The sun must have swung around the mountainside: the olive tree’s shade wasn’t over him any more.  _Dropped off for a good while there,_  he thought, rubbing his eyes. _No monster yet? Might as well get up and see what’s happening, then._

The Prince stretched, opened his eyes fully, blinked…

And in mid-stretch, froze, gazing up at what spread around him.

The _light…_

It was far more than just the sun. He was sitting with his back against, not a tree, but a tall fluted pillar of warm stone. Under him was green grass with daisies in it, every one of them bright as a star in this hot white sunlight. Away in front of him the ground rose, roughened a little, running upward into rocky heights. But as those heights reached further up, the Prince realized there was much more to be seen on their slopes than just rocks. Those peaks and precipices leaning against the great core of the mountain that supported them were set all about with mighty and beautiful buildings, all white marble, blazing in the sun: palaces, temples, great open terraces and wide porches crowned with upward-spearing columns and porticoes, everything white or covered with gold right to the peak of the mountain. There at the very top rose up one final vast palace, rearing itself against the intense hot blue of the sky in pillared level upon level, up to a final crown of columns with a dome of gold too bright to look at.

The breath went out of the Prince as he gazed up at it all. Slowly he got to his feet to do honour to what he saw, for the majesty and beauty of it struck him to the heart: and he began to tremble a little, and wasn’t ashamed to do so. He knew what he was looking at. Homer sang of it, and well the Prince knew the passage. This was the place that was never shaken with wind or lashed with rain, nor drifted about with snow in winter; but the shining air stretches endlessly away clear into the cloudless distances, whilst eternal radiance suffuses the whole place and reflects itself burning afar.

The Prince stood there and began thinking that maybe Homer had understated the case a little.  When he could find breath again, he could do nothing but shake his head.

_Olympus._

_“What_ am I doing here,” he said softly; “seriously, _what?”_

He stood there for a few breaths more, taking it all in. Nothing changed: nothing moved: even the wind was still.

“All right,” the Prince said then, more to hear his own voice again and feel the breath going in and out of his chest—at least partly to convince himself that he wasn’t dead.

He turned his wrist over, took his pulse. Still beating. _Though elevated. Well,_ yes, _that makes a certain sense under the circumstances._

The Prince dropped his hand, shook his head, and crouched to pick up his spear, which had been lying beside him where he’d fallen asleep. Then he straightened again and looked around. _So_ now _what do I do?_

He turned to have a look at the view behind him. He was, he realized, standing on a sort of shelf on the mountainside. The column he had been leaning against was one of a pair that marked a sort of pathway laid out through the grass in white stone. At the far end of the walkway…

The Prince didn’t know what to call it. It was a building, certainly; but if it was a palace, it was a smaller one than he’d seen before. Even his family’s was bigger. It was taller than it was broad, done in what looked like white cut stone, like everything else up on the mountain; it had a black door, and three rows of two windows each that went up to its flat square roof. A building less like the soaring majestic edifices overshadowing it from up the mountainside could hardly have been imagined. Beyond it was nothing but blue air, and (the Prince assumed, since he was unable to see it) the long, long drop off the mountain toward Earth and the mortal world.

 _Well,_ the Prince thought, _whatever brought me here certainly had the power to put me wherever it wanted me to be. So since that’s what’s closest to me at the moment, I suppose that’s where I’m expected to go._

_Fine, then._

He started up the white stone path. There were modest gardens laid out on either side of it, with rose bushes: at least they looked to the Prince like roses, though the flowers looked to be more complicated than the simple five-petalled kind that grew wild in his own country. Among these, about three-quarters of the way up the path toward the building and set a little way into the garden from the path, was a white box of some kind, about a cubit square and maybe two cubits tall, standing up on little feet. The prince stopped to look at it. The box had several layers; between those layers there were narrow horizontal openings. And in and out of the openings, bees were flying.

 _It’s a hive!_ the Prince thought. He immediately crouched down by it to take a look at it, for this was a matter of professional interest to him; without bees, there were no crops, and without crops, there were very shortly no Kings. ... _Such an unusual design!_ _My Gods, how does this even work?_ His hands immediately started itching to take it apart and find out how it was made, for its outsides were perfectly clean; there was none of the usual mess and spill of honey and waste wax around the edges that every beekeeper had to put up with. ...However, he didn’t have access to any smoke, and wherever he was now, he doubted the bees would appreciate it if he just started yanking their hive apart without doing them the basic courtesy of calming them down first. Not to mention what their keeper would think—

“Uh, hello?”

The Prince started violently upright, nearly jumping out of his armor, for the voice had spoken right behind him without him seeing or hearing anyone come near him at all. He whirled.

There was no one there.

“Oh, I’m _so_ sorry,” said the voice that had spoken to him. It was a young woman’s voice, sounding quite young and charming and a bit excited. In fact she sounded like she might burst out into giggles at any moment, though she seemed a bit apologetic as well. “I didn’t mean to startle you!”

He looked over his shoulder again, just on the off chance that someone might have appeared behind him. But there was still no one there. “Uh… excuse me?” said the Prince.

“Oh no, excuse _me,”_ the voice said, “it’s not your fault you know, everybody’s schedule’s just a mess today, with him having to go off to the Yard all of a sudden, and you being here already so early, you shouldn’t have been here for hours yet—”

“I shouldn't?” the Prince said, becoming extremely confused. “Sorry, I thought—  Isn’t some kind of monster supposed to be devouring me or some such about now?”

The voice did giggle now, and the moment was just so strange that the Prince had to laugh too. _“Monster!”_ she said. “Oh, who called him _that_? I bet I know. No, no, not _you_ of course! But it’s funny, because—no, maybe I shouldn’t talk about that—”

 _I’m standing here laughing outside some kind of bijou palace on Mount Olympus with an invisible woman,_ the Prince thought _. I think I can safely say that this is_ not _how I expected my day was going to go…_ “Forgive me,” he said,  “but is it normally the way things work around here that…” He glanced around him, just to be sure. “That I wouldn’t be able to see you?”

“Oh yes, that’s the way it works, I’m invisible,” said the invisible young woman. “Well, I might as well be invisible _anyway_ , because frankly he mostly looks right through me even when he _can_ see me. It’s just the way he is, though, you get used to that pretty quickly…” The invisible lady sounded almost a little resigned.

“‘He?’” the Prince said. “This is— _not_ the monster that was supposed to eat me that we’re talking about, I take it.”

“What? Oh, good heavens, whoever gave you the idea that anything was going to _eat_ you?” The invisible woman sounded not just vaguely horrified, but scandalized.

“The prophecy that came to the oracles,” said the Prince, “said that I was supposed to be—” He was surprised that he actually had to stop and try to remember the message; after the stress of the last few days, he’d have thought the words were scarred onto his heart. “‘Given as prey to a dark and terrible being whom even the Gods fear.’”

The invisible lady instantly burst out into peals of infectious laughter. “Oh my goodness,” she said after she’d recovered herself a little, “just listen to that, he does love to be dramatic! Really got their attention, too, I bet.”

“Yes,” the Prince said, sounding perhaps just a bit resigned, “you could say it did.”

The invisible woman, or spirit, or whatever she was, immediately sounded upset. “Oh, I am _so_ sorry, that does sound so sort of _final_ , doesn’t it? I’m sure he didn’t mean that to happen, he’s just so oblivious to what’s funny and what’s not funny sometimes, and he says the most _dreadful_ things, but he doesn’t mean to hurt. I remember the time when he—no, maybe I shouldn’t talk about that, but—  But, oh my Gods _look_ at me, I’m just letting you just stand around out here and you haven’t had anything to eat or drink or—  Here, come on in, come inside!”

Something caught the Prince by the hand. This was fine, except that there was nothing _there_ to do the catching. In reflex he snatched his hand back, shocked.

“Oh, forgive me, I’m so sorry, I should have warned you. That was me!” said the young woman’s voice. “Sorry, everybody else here is used to us, it’s so easy to forget. Here, look, put your hand out—”

 _Look_ where, _exactly?_ the Prince thought. But he put his hand out regardless.

“Here now, it’s just me,” said the voice, “don’t be upset, all right? There’s absolutely nothing to be upset about here, nothing’s going to hurt you, you should make yourself completely at home, because that’s the whole idea, isn’t it? You wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

And the invisible woman led him up the white-stone path to the front of the palace. The Prince looked up at it, lost in admiration of the windows. “That’s glass in those,” he said softly. “You have windows with _glass_ in them.”

“Oh yes,” said his invisible guide, “believe me, you want them up here when the weather gets ugly, especially in the winter.”

The Prince blinked. “I thought Homer said it never rained or snowed here and the weather was always good…”

The invisible woman snorted. “Wishful thinking,” she said, amused. “He must have been here during a nice spell. The tourists always seem to get them. Never fails...”

They stepped up together onto the doorstep, and the Prince looked at the dark door, which had on it the numbers and letter ΣΚΛβ in gold, above a door-knocker that looked like an ornate and stretched-out drawer pull.

“Two hundred twenty-one B?” said the Prince.

“That’s right,” said the invisible woman. “This is the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty One Bees.”

The Prince glanced back at the hive with a half-smile. “Is that really all there are in there? Kind of a small swarm.”

“Believe me, they’re enough!” said his guide, and she did giggle this time. “Come on.”

Apparently without being touched, the door swung open. “This is going to be your house too, now,” the voice said, “and everything in it is yours to command. So you come in and just make yourself right at home.”

And the Prince, not knowing what to make of _any_ of this but more than willing to find out, took a deep breath and went in.


	11. Of the House of the Two Hundred Twenty-One Bees and What The Prince Found There

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Prince is made welcome; the God is late; the Game is On.
> 
> Warnings for Minoan-class plumbing, random viticultural musings, and _Camellia sinensis v. olympiis._ ...Oh, and bees.

There were seventeen steps up from the tiny room or hallway into which the black door opened: the Prince paused at the bottom of them, letting his eyes get used to the relative dimness after the brilliance of the outdoors.

“Mrs. Hudson’s not here,” said the invisible woman as the Prince looked around, “she’ll be so mortified that she wasn’t here to greet you, but it’s like I said, everything’s so mad today with Himself off schedule. She’ll be here soon, I’m sure.  Go ahead up! There’s a rack behind the door for your spear…”

The Prince slotted his spear down into the rack and hung his helm over one of the nearby coat pegs by its chin strap. Then he headed up the steps, the sound of his armor’s gentle creaking seeming very loud in the restricted space. The stairs switched back on themselves by a little window: and at the top of the second flight there was a door of unfamiliar make that he wasn’t quite sure how to open. But hands he couldn’t see opened it for him, and light spilled out.

“That’s the sitting room. Go on in,” the invisible woman said.

The Prince stepped in, paused, looked around. The broad tall windows to his right let in the brilliant light from outside through thin filmy curtains that covered their lower halves. Between the windows stood a desk covered with parchments, sheets of something finer and thinner cut into oblongs and also closely overwritten, styli and other odd writing implements, bound codices, and other objects the Prince didn’t recognize.  On the wall above the desk hung the skull of something like an aurochs, but with shorter horns and some strange ornament clasped over its ears. Elsewhere around the room, which seemed painted in strange bold repeating patterns, were dark wooden shelves for books, small cupboards, a broad couch, a low table. But right before him set on a patterned carpet were two chairs, one to the left and one to the right of a small tiled hearth, in which a little bright fire was burning.

 _“Ohh,”_ the Prince said. It wasn’t so much a word as a sound, a sigh, that the sight of that fire pulled out of him. And even though all around him the light of a broad day the likes of which he’d never seen was spilling into that room, looking at those chairs he could see the shadow that would later fall around them, deep into the evening, and how that room would look in that warm dimness. And someone else would be sitting in the chair on the right-hand side…

“Himself, you said.” The Prince slowly went over to the left-hand chair, dropped his hand to the back of it.  There was a strange cross-woven throw across the back of it, and a pillow with a design of straight and diagonal crosses on it in red, white, and blue. “Who is he?”

“He’s the Consulting God,” said the invisible lady.

“Wait,” said the Prince. “I’m so sorry, here I’ve been talking to you for all this while and I don’t even know your name!”

“I’m Thalastrae,” she said. “I mean, we all are. I should tell you, there’s more than one of me.”

The Prince blinked. “How do you manage that?”

“It’s complicated,” she said. “But it does make coordinating things easier. You know all those times when you say ‘Wow, it’s the kind of day when I wish there were ten of me”? I did that, and it happened.” She chuckled. “You have to watch what you wish for around here…”

“I’ll remember that,” said the Prince. “But I’m sorry, Thalastrae, you were telling me—he’s a Consulting God? What’s his name?”

“He doesn’t have one yet. He’s new. Come on in, have a look at the kitchen.”

The Prince went after her, reflecting that it was going to take a little doing to learn to be with the inhabitants of this house if he had to work out where they were strictly by sound. He went through sliding doors into the kitchen and glanced around in some confusion, as he didn’t see anything that looked like it belonged in a kitchen in his part of the world.  “All right,” he said, glancing around. “So he’s new. What’s he the God of?”

“Nothing specific. He _consults_.” She said it with great pride. “He’ll tell you all about it.”

“I certainly hope so,” the Prince said, wandering through the kitchen and pausing at its far end near a window that looked down over the blue gulf of air behind the building. _Because_ how _can you be a God and not be the God_ of _something? This is such an interesting day I’m having…_

To his left was a tall double cupboard that was made of some bright metal, brushed to a matte gleam. Down the right side of its doors were what seemed to be long handles. The Prince slipped his hand through the topmost one, pulled.

“Um, I was about to tell you about that…” said Thalastrae.

“There’s a _head_ in the cupboard,” the Prince said, torn amongst astonishment, slight brief disgust and absolute fascination. “A bloody head!”

“It’s not _my_ fault,” the Head said.

The Prince jumped. “Sorry?”

“It’s not my fault I’m bloody. I’m an experiment, apparently.” It sounded a little put out. “Not that I recall being consulted on whether I want to be one. And not that it might not work better if someone would tell me _what_ I was an experiment _on._ Or _for_. But _no_ , he keeps going on about ‘observer effect’ and somebody named Heisenberg. …You’re not Heisenberg, are you?”

The head sounded so hopeful, he hated to disappoint it.  “Sorry… no.”

“Well, will you ask him?” said the Head. “Just tell him I’ve been here for, well, I’m not sure any more how long. Being dead ruins your time sense, rather.  If he’s forgotten me, that’s one thing, I know he’s busy. But if he’s _not_ busy, I’d really like to know if I’m still needed.”

“Um, yes, I’ll pass that on.” There were certainly ethical constraints about leaving human body parts unburied—the owner’s soul couldn’t cross the Last River until a majority of the body was either burnt or put in the ground with the appropriate rites. _But if a given body part’s still talking, yes, I could see where that might start to complicate the ethical picture a bit…_

The Prince shook his head at the sheer bizarreness of the thought. In the meantime he was finding himself somewhat distracted by the chill inside that cupboard. He waved his hand around it, wondering where it came from. “How does it do this?” he said. “This could be really useful. You could keep, I don’t know, things that you didn’t want to go bad, in here. The way we keep milk down in the cellars…”

“Can’t help you there,” the head said sadly.  “Sorry.”

“All right,” said the Prince. “I’ll just close this up again, shall I?”

“Might as well.”

“Fine,” the Prince said. “Talk to you later.” He closed the cupboard, shaking his head. Then he glanced around the kitchen’s counters again and failed to see anything that looked like even something so basic as a cookpot—

Over to one side, though, he spotted something that made him think of a ewer or jug of some sort. It was made of glass, and had a handle of some strange smooth black material he’d never seen before, neither wood nor metal. It seemed to be fastened to the wall with some kind of cord.  “What’s this?” the Prince said.

“Oh! The kettle. It boils water.”

“Boils it—” The Prince blinked. “You mean you put this in the fire and heat it up?”

“No, it doesn’t need fire. It does it itself.”

“Isn’t that something,” the Prince said, picking it up to look at it and realizing that the jug part stood on a little stand, to which the cord was connected. “This would be useful for all kinds of things! You could wash wounds with the water afterwards, and not worry about contamination, with this lid—” He popped the kettle’s top open, stared down into it. “Be easy to keep that from getting too mucky….” He thought for a moment of the last time he’d had to deal with one of the kettles back home while mulling that last hot-wine preparation for his father, the nuisance it always was getting the baked-on soot off the outside after it had been in the brazier… 

And _there_ was a thought. Hot drinks, in the evening, like what his mother enjoyed with kamamilis or mint: that would be so easy with this.  “Thalastrae,” he said, “have you got any mint in here?”

“Might be in one of those cupboards right over the kettle,” she said from the sitting room.  “Or underneath,” she said from right behind him.

He blinked. A third voice came from down the hallway that led out of the kitchen toward the back of the house. “Or in the one up top on the other side of the table…”

Such _an interesting day._ “Even melissa would be all right,” the Prince said, “or wild sage…”

“You’re just going to have to hunt for it, I’m afraid,” said the Thalastrae in the sitting room. “We tried keeping an inventory once, but it just doesn’t work. He has some kind of system, but none of us understand it… and the minute we start thinking we do, he changes it again.”

“All right,” the Prince said, and opened the cupboard above the kettle to see what was there.

“Before you get in too deep,” Thalastrae said, sounding a bit concerned, “I should warn you about the cupboards. He keeps things in there… and they’re, well, sometimes very _peculiar_ things…”

Right at the front of the cupboard was a glass jar with a most interesting top that the Prince couldn’t work out how to unfasten. That said, since the jar was full of a clear liquid and about twenty toes, perhaps leaving it fastened was a better option.  “I take your point,” the Prince said.

He started rummaging through the cupboard in earnest, keeping his mind on the possibility of a nice soothing hot mint infusion—as a little touch of soothing wouldn’t come amiss right now—while pulling things out and setting them on the counter, then once more digging toward the cupboard’s deeper reaches. Some of the containers he found were foodstuffs, but with labels he couldn’t read. Some weren’t food, and weren’t labeled, and the smells that came from them or the view inside them led the prince to leave them strictly alone. Before long the counter was completely covered with more stuff than should have ever have fit in the cupboard at all. “How is this possible?” he muttered, not so much annoyed as amused.

“It’s just the way business goes around here,” said another of Thalastrae’s voices, out in the front hall (and he could now hear two of them having a conversation in the front room).“The improbable we do every day! The impossible… well, to be perfectly honest we don’t get a lot of that around here, not with Himself on the job…”

The Prince put his head a little ways into the cupboard, peering in to try to see the back of it. It was all shadowy back there, defeating the eye. He did start to catch a whiff of something, though, that might have been spices. “Hmm,” he said, reached much deeper in and started pulling out more packages.

Finally, some of these were herbs. The Prince caught the scent of thyme at one point and started digging in that direction, pulling out smaller containers now. _Garlic… oregano… sage. Useful enough._ But after a few minutes a darker, stranger scent caught his attention, and the Prince reached as far back into the cabinet as he could and came out with a little canvas bag tied at the neck with string. He undid the string, took a whiff.

“Hmm,” the Prince said: put the bag down on the counter and reached in to take a big pinch of the stuff. It was some kind of smallish, blackish dried leaf, broken up coarsely. He dumped what he’d taken into the palm of his right hand, rubbed his palms together, then sniffed, as if he was testing olive oil for taste and scent.

A warm tangy _brown_ aroma came up to meet him. He touched his tongue to the bruised, warmed leaf, rolled a bit of it in his mouth. _Surprisingly complex,_ he thought. _Almost spicy._ He could just taste it, hot, with honey in it. _That would work_ —”Where should I go to get some water?” the Prince said. “Have you got a well?”

“Oh yes, but you don’t have to go outside for it,” one of the Thalastraes said. “It comes out of the wall right here. See this?” An invisible hand reached past him—it was getting so that he could hear them a bit when they moved—and one of the odd-shaped handles on the pipe over the nearby wall basin did a quarter-turn.  Water gushed out from the pipe, clean and cold.

“That is _so_ useful,” the Prince said under his breath. “How my mother would love this…!” But uncharacteristically his heart started to ache a little at the thought of her, as if at the feeling of something lost and never to be recovered. _If only that’s not true. But if not, then if only there was just some way to let them know back home that I was right, that I’m not dead—_

_Later. Too soon to start asking questions. Let’s find out the hows and whys of me being here first._

“Right,” he said, and filled the kettle, then put it down on its stand again. “Now how do we make it do thi _ _s_ —_”

“Here,” said Thalastrae, and reached past him again to press down a little lever at the side of the kettle. To the Prince’s astonishment, the kettle lit up blue from beneath and began to murmur to itself as the water heated.

He shook his head in wonder. “It’ll take a few minutes,” Thalastrae said. “Do you want to see your room in the meantime? It’s up this way.”

He went up the stairs after her with slight difficulty: his leg had begun bothering him again -- probably nothing he should have been surprised about in the course of such a day. _Kind of surprising that I hadn’t noticed it until now,_ he thought as he came out at the top of the stairs.  Across the landing was a door: he studied its handle for a moment, worked out how to turn it, opened the door.

“I would have done that for you!” Thalastrae said.

“Oh, come on, you can’t do _everything_ for me…” he said as he went in.

She laughed, the sound of it a little dry. “That’s going to be a novel concept around here…”

The Prince was a little distracted for the moment as he looked around. The patterns painted on the walls here were a little more subtle: there was a window like the ones down in the sitting room, and a carpet, and a good-sized couch, well-cushioned and easily twice the width of his at home. A carved wooden wardrobe stood across the room, one of its doors open, and he caught a glimpse of soft worn linen canvas in there. “That’s my tunic…”

“Of course. All your things are here; West Wind brought them around just after he fetched you up.”

The Prince smiled a little at the memory of what he had at the time thought was a dream. “So that’s how I got here,” he said. “Well, he was very gentle with me.”

“He’d better have been,” Thalastrae said, sounding amused. “The God told him in no uncertain terms, don’t shake him up or I’ll have Aeolus stuff you in the bag for a month, and local shipping be damned!”

The Prince raised his eyebrows at that as he looked through the wardrobe, seeing that all his things were indeed there—even the bags and boxes that had been at the bottom of his own clothes-chest at the far end of the couch in his chambers. Also present was his medical kit, the one he brought with him while traveling or on campaign. He was glad to see it; there were some very useful things in there. But something else about all this made him smile—the thought that someone back home would quickly notice that all his things were gone. _Let them take hope from that!_ he thought. _Because why would the Gods bother vanishing a dead man’s personal effects? Surely Father or Mother will discover this, and start realizing that what I suspected was true…_

He could only hope. For the meantime he shut the wardrobe door and turned. “Is there an armoury,” he said, starting to undo the straps of his breastplate, “or can I dig up a rack somewhere? I don’t want to leave my armor just lying around the place.”

“We can find you a rack,” said Thalastrae. “Just put your things on the couch for now and someone will rack them up for you later. Did you want a shower?”

He blinked at that, thinking of the weather back at home over recent days. “No,” the Prince said, “I think I’ve had enough of showers for the time being…”

“What?— Oh!” And Thalastrae burst out laughing. “Not what I meant. When you come back downstairs again, I’ll show you.”

The Prince slipped out of his armlets and the rest of his plastron and left them on the couch, though he left on his greaves and swordbelt for the moment, and headed back downstairs just in the short-sleeved under-plastron tunic and the _pteryges_ kilt. As he came down to the bottom of the stairs, Thalastrae was right by him again; this time he felt her go by in a little breath of air heading to his left. “Down here,” she said. “The God’s room is right down at the end. But here—”

A door in the middle of the hall swung open. “The bathroom,” she said.

The Prince’s eyebrows went right up. Where he came from, fine ceramic was nearly as expensive and difficult to come by as gold, but here was a whole room apparently done in it, with more of the water-spouting pipes seemingly everywhere. He whistled. “Very Minoan,” he said. “State of the art! Nothing but the best on Olympus, I see that…”

Thalastrae laughed again. “Here, this is a shower—” 

She showed him. The Prince was impressed. “Hot water too. Have you got a hot spring underneath the place?”

“Oh no, it just comes out that way. Something Hephaestus installed, apparently. All the palaces have it.”

“Well, this can wait for later, but I definitely want to try it,” the Prince said.

“Water’s boiling!” said another Thalastrae from the kitchen.

The Prince headed back in there. Invisible hands had cleared off part of the kitchen table for him—it was otherwise much crowded with mysterious instruments and strangely-shaped glassware—and plates were being set down with sliced meats and chunks of cheese and bread. Other unseen hands brought a glass flask full of deep red wine and a cup of glass floating through the air, and set them down as well. The Prince shook his head. “That,” he said, smiling, “is amazing.”

“Is it really?” Several of the Thalastrae giggled together. “I guess it might be, the first time you see it! Prince, eat, drink, be refreshed… and relax. If there’s anything you need, all you have to do is ask; we’re always around until you tell us not to be.”

“Thank you, ladies,” he said. He picked up the cup—a slender elongated sort of bowl-shape on a long stem—and wondered at it: it seemed as fragile as a flower petal, the glass thin as a thumbnail. Carefully the Prince poured some wine into it, and then glanced circumspectly at the floor. It had plainly had seen a fair amount of spillage in the recent past, enough for him not to be concerned that the housekeeper would come after him for making a mess. He lifted the glass and carefully tilted it, twisting it deftly as he did so that just a single drop or so spilled on the floor.

And that brought the Prince to an etiquette problem that stumped him for a moment. _When you’re in a God’s own house, who exactly do you pour your libation_ to? _Especially when he doesn’t have a name?_ “My host,” he said finally, “and all Gods: be thanked for your good gifts.”  Then he drank.

 _…Oh, my_ Gods, was his first thought, and he closed his eyes to shut everything out and savor the small mouthful. _Father would simply break his heart over this._   The fragrance and sheer depth of flavor of the vintage was astonishing: it was to a normal wine what a God might be to a man. A sense of some summer that never ended, of vines growing lush on some hillside where no rot or destroying insect ever came, lingered long and honeyed on the palate like an aftertaste of Heaven. Swallowed, the wine's savor glowed softly in the throat and faded slowly as a summer sunset.

“Nice?” one of the Thalastrae said. “Dionysus supplies us direct from his private reserve. The God did him a favor once…”

“Nice,” the Prince said, opening his eyes again, “ _yes_. Very nice indeed.” He carefully put down the glass and picked up a flat bread instead; it would be too easy to get far too friendly with that wine, and that struck him as a very bad idea before he’d eaten anything, or even met the deity he was staying with.

 _And in any case, I haven’t finished with this business over here._  “If I just push that lever again,” the Prince said, “the water will boil up again?”

“Absolutely.”

He pushed the lever and then started going through more cupboards. “You know,” the Prince said, “what I really need now would be some kind of pot with a lip or a spout you could pour from – “

“I’d swear I saw something like that in here a while back,” said one or another of the Thalastrae. And suddenly doors were flying open and sliding back and popping up all over the kitchen, and hands he couldn’t see were hunting around and pulling things out, and the air was full of hovering crockery and strange implements. The Prince tore off a bite or two of his bread and stood quite still, unwilling to move and accidentally catch a serving platter in the back of the head.

“Here,” one of the Thalastrae said, “how about this?” And a strange little iron pot hung in front of him at nose level. It was round, and had a little short spout, and there was a round lid on top.

“That might do it,” said the Prince, took it from her and put it down on the counter. “Thank you!” He took its lid off, picked up the little bag of the brown herb, and measured out a palmful: then dumped it into the little pot and waited for the water to boil again. This happened quite quickly, as it had boiled so recently before. The Prince lifted the jug off the stand when the boiling had died down and poured the little pot full; then put its lid back on.

It wouldn’t be ready for a few minutes, if it was like most herbal infusions he knew, so he finished the soft flat bread he’d been working on and had another, as well as some of the meat, which was beef and pork, both beautifully roasted.  “This is really wonderful,” he said to the Thalastrae. “Your cook has a gift.”

“Oh, Mrs. Hudson did that,” said one of the invisible ladies. “She likes a nice roast once a week or so – “

Downstairs, the door to the outside opened. “Speak of the goddess and you see her robes,” another of the Thalastrae said.

“Woo hoo!” said a voice from downstairs.  “Anybody home?”

 _“He’s here!”_ all the Thalastrae said in chorus.

Footsteps on the stairs. “What, so early? Didn’t Westie get the text? Oh, everything’s in such a muddle today – “

Up onto the landing came a little slim spry-looking older woman in violet robes, with short hair halfway between silver and gold and a wise, merry face. “Woman” he might have called her at first sight, but there was no missing a kind of bright tremor of light in the air around her that marked her out as something more than merely mortal.

She leaned in the door, peering around, and caught sight of the Prince as he came in out of the kitchen. “There you are, dear,” she said, “and after so much fuss!” And she came straight to him with her hands held out.

A strange pang went through the Prince as he realized how much her eyes and her manner reminded him of his mother’s. He was hard put to it not to simply go to her and hug her. But he restrained himself, dropping to one knee and taking the offered hands to touch them to his forehead.   _A little formal maybe, but for the Gods’ sake this is Mount Olympus, and if she’s not one of the Great Twelve she’s a Goddess regardless._ “Lady, thank you for your welcome—“

“You get right up, young man, there’s no point in being formal here,” she said, laughing; “it’ll never catch on with your fellow tenant, that’s for certain.” She glanced around. “Did all your things make it here all right? Have they fed you? If you need a bathe or a lie-down, you tell everyone to just clear off until you’re ready to see anybody again. The day you must have had! And with this heat, it’s a wonder you’re still upright…”

The Prince stood up, considering that “seeing anyone” acquired a whole new set of implications in this neighborhood. “I’m very well, lady, very well taken care of, thank you—”

“Mrs. Hudson will do, Prince! We don’t fuss about with formality here, believe me. Wouldn’t be the slightest point.”

“But… Forgive me, you said ‘the other tenant’—”

She blinked those wise eyes at him. “Well, he very much said ‘flatmate’ to _me,_ dear,” she said.  “I’d let the terminology rest for the time being… doubtless the two of you will sort it out eventually.” She glanced around. “Everything else all right? They did explain the plumbing, didn’t they?”

“Yes, Mrs. Hudson!” all the Thalastrae said, at least five or six of them together, sounding like exasperated children confirming that they’d all washed up before bedtime.

“Good, because I have to go right out again, the sheer nuisance of it! But when Queen Hera says she has a schedule conflict, all the rest of us just have to grin and bear it, don’t we. Seriously, a canasta afternoon should not be a _chore._ …Has he even bothered texting to say when he’ll be back?”

“Literally a minute ago,” said one of the Thalastrae, from over by the window. The Prince looked toward her and blinked. In midair, shining letters were hanging there: they said BACK AT SUNSET. —

“Hours yet,” said Mrs. Hudson. “Prince, looks like you’ll have the afternoon to yourself.  If I were you I’d have a good long soak and a nap. I certainly wish I could…!”

She was already off down the stairs. “I’m off out, you lot just take it easy, not that there’s anything else we can do…” And the front door shut.

The Prince stood there a little bemused. “It’s not always like this, really,” said one of the Thalastrae. “Well, actually, it is, it’s even worse when Himself’s on site, sometimes; it’s just not usually _this_ particular kind of disorganized.”

“It’s all right, honestly,” the Prince said, heading back into the kitchen. “I mean, if you had to choose a kind of disorganization, this certainly wouldn’t lack for interest.” He paused by the kettle counter, lifted the lid of the little iron pot, sniffed at it.

 _“Oh,”_ he said, and held very still.  The dark, somehow tart aroma floating up from the infusion had struck right up into him in a way very like to what the first sight of the fire had done.

He hastily looked around on the cluttered end of the kitchen table for something that one could drink a hot drink from. Finally amidst the jumble of glassware and strange metallic implements the Prince found an odd sort of cup painted in horizontal stripes of blue and white, with a looped handle on one side. _It’d keep your fingers away from the heat,_ he thought. _Sensible._ He brought it over to the counter, picked up the iron pot by its own looped handle, poured.

He lifted the cup, and that dark fragrance rose up around him; he breathed in the steam of it. The scent was strange, yet it was _not_ strange. He knew it from somewhere. He knew he should put it aside to let it cool a little, but at the same time he didn’t want to wait a second more. Very carefully, so as not to scald his tongue, the Prince sipped.

 _Where have you_ been? the taste of the hot liquid said to him. _About time you got here._ _Welcome home!_

“So how is it?” said one of the Thalastrae, at his elbow.

He was shocked to find that he was actually trembling a little bit, the way he had on first laying eyes on Mount Olympus. But this wasn’t about awe. This was—he didn’t even know _what_ this was, except that it was profoundly troubling, and very, _very_ good. And “Good,” was all he was able to manage for a moment, sounding a little strangled.

Then he looked toward the sitting room. “It’s called tea, isn’t it,” the Prince said. The word had come into his head out of nowhere. Yet it felt right. It felt like he’d somehow known it before: as if it had been lying deep at the bottom of his mind waiting to be found.

“I don’t know,” said Thalastrae, “but if you say that’s what it should be called, then that’s what we’ll call it.”

The Prince nodded and drank the tea, staring into the cup and trying to get a grip on himself. _But maybe this should be no surprise,_ he thought, as the trembling started to ebb a little. _Why would I_ not _have some reaction after a day like this? Honestly._

And the more he drank the stuff, the more settled and calmer he started to feel. The effect was quite different from that of wine, though he might turn his attention back to that later in the day. Right now it was far too early to drink such a wine unmixed, and the tea was really very good. _Could be a little sweeter, though,_ he thought, and went in to find the honey pot that he’d pulled out of the cupboard along with everything else.

The pot was on the table, along with a horn spoon: the Prince dipped some out, releasing another cloud of sublime fragrance as he stirred it into his cup. _Hymettus?_ he thought. _Why not? They’ve got Minoan plumbing, why wouldn’t they have honey from Hymettus?_  He put the spoon down, sipped, sighed.

 _Bliss._ “Does anyone else want some of this?” he said. “It’s really very good, especially with the honey.”

“No thanks, Prince, we don’t eat or drink on duty…”

He wandered into the sitting room and looked down at the left-hand chair by the fire; then slowly, after another sip of the tea, settled into it and gazed into the fire, which somehow or other hadn’t burned down at all since he’d arrived. He shut his eyes and leaned back for a moment, cradling the cup in his hands, and reflected on how strange it was that, with the discovery of the Tea, almost everything here somehow now seemed perfect. But there was still one thing missing—something that would cause everything else to make sense, to be the way it ought to be.

“Prince, I think we’re pretty much done here for the moment,” said Thalastrae, from near the door to the stairs. “Can you think of anything else you need?”

“Only one,” the Prince said, “but I think I get to wait until sunset for that.” And then he blinked, and wondered a little at his own phrasing.

“All right. If you need us, call. Otherwise, we’re gone.”

“Thank you!” he said.

And silence fell.

***

He sat there a while, finishing his tea: not thinking, not doing anything, just holding still… something he hadn’t had leisure to do for days. Then, after a while more, when the tea was done, he went back to the bathroom they’d shown him, filled the tub, and took that long soak that Mrs. Hudson had recommended. By the time he got out—somewhat wrinkled and very clean, for there were soaps and scrubs in there that he’d never seen or heard of before, and he spent some time experimenting with them—the afternoon was already leaning toward evening, and the sitting room, which had been bright with sunshine and the downshed radiance from Olympus, was now in shadow, the sun having gone behind the mountain. The sky in that direction was turning golden, shading slowly toward rose. It was the kind of sky that in mortal realms would forecast a fair day tomorrow.

Dressed again, the Prince went to get himself another cup of tea, and paused in the sitting room to unhitch his sheathed sword from his belt and hang it over the back of the left-hand chair by the fireplace. Then he sat down again, stretching out his legs, sighing. As he did, something of that feeling of peace from his dream slipped down over him, and he wondered when, even back home, he had ever felt lapped in more perfect comfort.  He drank his tea, gazed into the fire, watched things gently get dimmer around him. Shadows gathered in the corners of the room. The fire, unchanged, burned bright.

He yawned, feeling the weariness of the day catching up with him. _They did tell me to take a nap,_ the Prince thought. _I might just do that._ But a thought had come to him a little earlier. He reached into the pouch at his belt and pulled out the one thing it held besides the coins he’d brought—thinking he might need them—for the Ferryman.

Between his fingers the Prince rolled, then held up to the firelight, the plain bronze pin. In his fingers it was still warmer than it should properly have been. But as he looked at it here, the fire glowed on it, not more brightly than would be normal, but exactly as it should.

He nodded, then put it away in the pouch again. He finished his tea, put the cup aside on the little table on the hearth side of the chair, folded his hands over his middle, leaned back, and dozed off.

***

Later, in near-darkness, the Prince woke up all at once—the immediate awakening long familiar to him from his campaigning days, the sort that told him someone was watching him out of the darkness.

The little hearthfire was still burning on his left, and as memory of the day came rushing back to him, the Prince’s heart leapt to know that this scene was no more a dream, but reality, part of his waking world: a dream come true. _And interesting,_ he thought, _that I never thought to look the other way in the dream._

He did that now.

In the doorway to the sitting room stood a tall, slender masculine shape, all in shadow. As he looked at it more closely, the Prince realized that more than conventional interior nighttime dimness was involved. From head to foot that form was wrapped in a darkness the eye couldn’t pierce. Only part of this was due to the strange shadowy cloak it wore, which clung oddly close to the upper half of its wearer’s body, as if trying to affectionately hug him.

The dark shape tilted its head a little as the two of them regarded one another. Then it spoke, the words deep and soft as if the darkness itself had been given voice.  “You don’t seem very frightened, Prince,” it said, as if they were simply continuing a conversation that had been started a long while before.

The Prince thought of the bronze pin, and smiled half a smile as he stood up from the left-hand chair to greet the one who stood in the doorway. “You don’t seem very frightening,” he said; and it was true. The darkness concealing the watcher didn’t bother him in the slightest. He knew in his bones, though he didn’t know how, that whatever the reason for it, the one inside the darkness meant him no harm.

“You’re a healer,” the tall shape said.  “A _warrior_ -healer.”

“As I think you've known for a while,” the Prince said.

“And you’ve seen a lot of violent death,” the dark shape said, moving slowly closer to him. The Prince could feel the shadows in the corners of the room crowding in toward the one who approached, and toward him as well: but he felt no fear. “A lot of trouble, too.”

“Yes,” said the Prince. “More than enough.”

The darkness bent in close, and through the shadows that hid its face the Prince could just catch a glimpse of pale, intense eyes within. There was interest in those eyes, but more than just that: an edge of excitement, of amusement, maybe even a touch of mischief. “Want to see some more?” the deep voice murmured.

“O God,” said the Prince, _“yes!_  …Though I do have some questions.”

He couldn’t himself see the God’s smile, but he could feel all the shadows in the room around him stirring with it.  “Then come along and I’ll start answering them.”

The shadow turned and headed out of the sitting room and down the stairs again. The Prince caught up his sword from the chair, reslung it at his belt, and went after, pausing only for a second to glance at his spear in the rack as they went by on the way to the door. “Sword be enough?” he said.

“Should be.” And together they stepped out the black door into the twilight that was falling over the Mountain, and had already drowned the rest of the world in night.  

The tall shadow paused on the doorstep to turn up the collar of its cloak as the door thumped shut behind them; the evening was already cooling down fast. A few late-flying bees came to buzz about their heads as they stood there. The God put one gloved hand up; one of the bees flew to his hand, perched on his finger. “No, it’s all right, you go on in now,” he said to it. “Don’t wait up.” He flicked his finger gently and the bee flew off toward the hive, its companions following it.

“And where are we going exactly?” said the Prince as they started down the walk.

“Off the Mount and down into the world,” said the God wrapped in shadow.  “Out where there are dangerous things running loose in the dark; evil things, some of them. Creatures that want to do your kind harm. Mine too, if they’ve got the brains and the power. I use reason to find out what they’re really up to; use the truth to hunt the dark things down, and stop them.” From within the shadow, those pale eyes glanced over at him.  “Interested?”

The Prince tilted his head as they went, thought about that. “Of course,” he said. “And I could be of some use in that regard. Didn’t someone say once that in battle, Truth’s too precious to send out without a bodyguard—?”

“Of lies,” said the God, amused. “Well, there are usually enough lies flying around during a case that they’re best avoided. Interesting, though, that you see the Work as a battlefield.”

The Prince could hear the emphasis put on the word.  “Habit, maybe,” he said. “And as for Reason, well, while it’s busy figuring things out, maybe it makes sense for someone to be watching its back.” 

Once again the Prince could feel the small satisfied smile behind the veiling shadow, even if he couldn’t see it. “My thoughts precisely. …So now I have a question for you, O Prince who’s also a healer. Do you do horses?”

The Prince laughed. “Of course I do horses! If yours goes lame or takes an arrow out on the battlefield, if you stand around waiting till a horse-coper's got time to get to you, you’ll probably pick up an arrow yourself. Or a spear in your guts. The more of your mount's repair and maintenance you can handle yourself, the better.”

“Excellent. Ever heard of Bellerophon?”

The Prince raised his eyebrows in surprise as they walked down the white stone path. “Why wouldn’t I have? He’s from just down the road, in Corinth. A local hero.” And then the obol dropped, and the Prince stared at the God as they went. “—Who caught himself a very unusual horse – “

“Pegasus,” the God said. “Yes.”

“And then made a name for himself going around and killing monsters for a while. I remember hearing about that weird mixed-up one out east, in Lycia I think. The  goat-lion-dragon thing that breathed fire.” He racked his memory briefly for the name, found it. “The Chimaera, wasn’t it? Nasty piece of work.”

The God nodded. “That’s right. One of the children of the giant Typhon and the half-serpent half-nymph Echidna. Some of the other siblings were Cerberus, the Hydra, the Sphinx....”

The Prince raised his eyebrows. “With children like that, you wonder what the marriage must have been like.”

His companion grunted, amused: though the amusement seemed to have a little edge to it.  “Quite.”

“Whatever became of Bellerophon, anyway?” the Prince said. “Haven’t heard much of him since.”

“As of this morning he’s in a coma,” said the God, “and we’re going to go find out who’s responsible.”

The Prince stopped where he was. “Wait. ‘ _Who’s—’_  You mean someone just tried to kill him?”

“The authorities aren’t sure, but we need to find an answer,” the God said, pausing as well. “His life’s hanging by a thread now, literally: the Fates have agreed to put down the Shears for just a few hours to see if it can be made clear whether the Furies need to be involved.” The God sounded grim. “With his accomplishments, and his family connections, such a mortal would normally be a candidate for the Elysian Fields. But with the accusations against him, Bellerophon might go the other way entirely—unless we can discover the truth in time. And we don’t have much time to work with. The Fates pick up the Shears again at dawn.”

The dark God gestured toward with his head toward the end of the walk, and the two of them started heading that way again, the God silent for a moment as if brooding over something. “This is why you went off schedule, then?” the Prince said.

“Yes. I was summoned.”

“But you said ‘his life’. You investigate attacks on mortals?”

“Normally, no,” said the God, and glanced away, up toward the Mount. “But when a mortal’s father is one of the twelve great Olympians, exceptions get made. Poseidon sired him… so Heaven’s forced to look into it.  And since Heaven’s out of its depth, as usual… that means they need _me.”_ The self-satisfaction in the voice came through strongly.

They reached the end of the white stone walk. “So. Ready, Prince?”

“For?”

The God was undoing his cloak. “This.”

He shook it out, whirled it about them. Shadow swirled out, wrapped about the two of them, clung close: drowned them both.

They vanished.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	12. Of the Bellerophon Case and Equine Diagnostics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Consulting God does deep background, the healer-Prince does a veterinary evaluation, and the Steed of the Muses plays favorites.
> 
> Warnings for godly exposition, accidental envenomation, and archetypal My Little Pony fandom.

The cloak’s darkness dissipated seconds later to that of mere twilight almost completely given way to night, with a brilliant half Moon standing high. Its white radiance cast everything around them in a sharp duality of silver-against-shadow. The God reclasped his cloak and then reached out across the Prince’s chest to crowd them both back against a wall behind them, putting a gloved finger to where his lips would have been within his personal darkness.

The Prince nodded, then held still, glanced around. The wall they leaned against was of cool pale stone: another one, similar, blank, maybe a tall man’s height in front of them, stretching right and left to a corner where another passage cut this one at right angles. Where they stood was paved in smooth brick, scattered here and there with grain and wisps of hay.

The God leaned sideways toward him. “We’re on the west side of Olympus,” he whispered, “down near the base. The stable blocks.”

The Prince nodded. “Should we get under cover?” he whispered back.

The God nodded and looked down to their right, then beckoned and moved that way in absolute silence. Nearly as silently the Prince went after him, left hand wrapped around his sword’s hilt and the neck of its sheath to make sure the sword didn’t shift and make a sound. The wall they’d been leaning on belonged to a long building that faced onto a sort of small central square, like the building on the far side of the passage they’d come down. A few low-burning cressets were fastened into the walls of the similar buildings across the square, which had numerous half-doors opening out of them.

The square was empty. The God glanced behind him at the Prince, gestured rightward with his head, then slipped around the corner. The Prince scanned the moonlit square and the shadows in the corner passages leading into it, then followed.

The God dodged right, vanished. The Prince went after, through the right-hand leaf of a wide double door being held open for him, and into the dimness within; then slipped leftward and flattened himself against the still-closed door as the open one eased shut and the latch fell to with a soft solid _thunk._

It took a second for his eyes to start adjusting to the deeper dimness, but before they did the Prince could hear the God let out a relieved breath. For the moment the Prince held still, letting his eyes finish getting used to the light, or lack of it, in this space. Most visible from the spot where they stood was a broad pale marble walkway that stretched right away from them to the back of the building, illuminated faintly by diffuse moonglow from windows set high in the right-hand wall. On either side of the walkway were large stalls, each with a shoulder-high wall of polished wood topped with a two-cubit-high grille of bronze bars. The whole place was full of the usual warm dark stable smells: manure, hay and grain, dry or damp straw. The occasional rustle or stamp of moving beasts could be heard in the stillness.

“Almost all the stable staff have gone off duty for the night,” the God said under his breath. “There was a question whether the Investigator would have left anyone in here… but as we see, they’ve decided they’ve finished with this line of inquiry.  All the same—”  He turned toward the wall behind them, where a thick wooden bolt lay in iron clamps, and took a moment to run it along through the bolt-brackets on the inside of the doors. “I do so dislike having my deliberations interrupted.”

“All right,” the Prince said softly. “So—accusations. _What_ accusations? What’s Bellerophon supposed to have done that would make the difference between going to Elysium or the House of Hades?”

“Well,” the God said. “You know at least some of his story already. Bellerophon’s a son of King Glaucus in Corinth; well, _theoretically_ his son, since everyone suspected from a young age that a God was involved somehow when the boy grew with unusual speed to great stature and strength. It was Poseidon, as I told you—apparently he had a fling with the Queen, and a wise mortal, King or commoner, doesn’t make too much of a fuss about such a thing if he wants to live out his years in peace.”

The Prince nodded. “Most kings wouldn’t mind having a son of divine blood around the house anyway. Sometimes it means you can call in favors with the, ah, biological parent.”

“Quite so. Anyway, at the beginning the story isn’t anything out of the ordinary. When Bellerophon comes to his full growth he starts pitting his strength against the local monsters; kills a few. And then, for reasons no one really understands, he decides that more than anything else in life he wants an immortal flying horse.”

 _“The_ immortal flying horse,” said the Prince.

“And he catches it and starts his life as a working hero.” The derision with which the God adorned the word practically glowed of its own dry heat in this dimness. “The King starts sending him on errands—there are rumors that the young man, or shall we say demigod, is a bit of a handful and better employed trouncing monsters at a distance than cooling his heels at home. And of course once he’s got the wondrous horse, distances are no barrier to him; he can be thousands of stadia away in hours. So that makes him a lot easier to deal with at home, whatever else has gone on in his early life.”

“Suggesting that something has.”

“Yes,” the God said, “he killed his brother. Apparently it was an accident of some kind. The oracle at Bassae told him to go off to the kingdom of Argos and do penitential work to be purified for it.”

“He’d have had to go to the local royal family for that,” the Prince said. “Being royal himself, the priests couldn’t have done it.”

“Quite right. He went to King Proetus’s palace in Tiryns. Walked there, indeed, nearly a thousand stadia as the first part of the penance… then did whatever tasks the King required of him. He was formally purified, and then went off about his heroic business. After a while he wound up in Lycia doing the monster-killing you mention for King Iobates, who’s the father of Proetus’s wife Queen Anteia. Came back to Tiryns relatively recently with some good news in hand: apparently Iobates was so impressed with his service that he offered him the hand of his younger daughter, Anteia’s sister Philonoe.”

The Prince raised his eyebrows at that. “You’d think he’d just sit tight and get married. Why’d he come back, exactly?”

“Hard to say,” the God muttered, sounding angry, “because the Investigator’s staff wasted half the day being overly deferential to everyone they interrogated and asking all the wrong questions! But the one thing they all seem agreed on is that when he _did_ come back, Bellerophon had had some kind of mood change. He’d supposedly begun talking obsessively about using Pegasus to fly to Mount Olympus and take up residence with the Gods.”

“Um,” the Prince said. “Sounds like a nonstarter to me.”

“I guarantee you it would have been,” said the God, sounding more annoyed by the moment. “Yet the man’s deep in coma and his heart can’t be read to tell what his true intentions were…  and meanwhile the King and Queen feel sure that the horse must have thrown its rider as part of a punishment sent by the Gods for Bellerophon’s hubris.”

“Is that likely? I mean, wouldn’t you know if that’s what had happened?”

The God laughed softly. “Prince, you’ve fallen into the common mortal error of assuming that the Gods are all on the same page all the time.” He shook his head. _“Could_ have happened, but it’s unlikely. Poseidon’s one of the three most powerful Gods—ruler of the whole realm of the Sea, as Zeus rules the Earth and Hades rules the Underworld. If a God had a grudge against a favored son of the Earthshaker’s, the _last_ thing they’d do would be to take any action that would set off an investigation like this.”

“So if it wasn’t a God—”

“Then all we’re left with is what his relatives say, and the fact that he fell off Pegasus within just a couple of miles of his home, in good weather and calm conditions, when he’d ridden the beast in far worse conditions while killing giant chthonic monsters that were spitting venom and breathing fire at him.”

“And you’re not convinced,” said the Prince.

“How can you tell?” growled the God. “There’s no data, Prince. It’s all hearsay. Yet if no better evidence can be brought forward, Bellerophon’s all too likely to die and go to the Shades on the most recent witnesses’ say-so. And here we still have no answers despite the investigators keeping me busy half the day about this business to no purpose because they wouldn’t let me interrogate the principals myself—” He pushed away from the door and started walking quietly down that long white walkway between the stalls. “So. Time to examine the only witness they’ve left me.”

“That being why you just locked us in here,” said the Prince, glancing over his shoulder. “Thereby locking everyone else out.”

“As I say, I hate being interrupted...”

The Prince was beginning to wonder about the God’s relationship with the “investigators”, whoever they were. “So how are you going to get the answer you need?” he said. “While I’ll grant you Pegasus is an unusual horse…”

The God snorted. “Springing full-formed from the Gorgon’s spilt blood strikes me as a good initial definition for the word. Not to mention creating the Muses’ spring at Hippocrene with just a blow of its hoof. Any horse that can create an unending source of water that will turn you into a poet after one drink? _Unusual_.”

“Well, yes. But does it understand spoken Greek, or just read minds?” the Prince said.

The God had tilted his head to one side as they went, apparently giving the Prince a thoughtful look through his darkness. “Meaning?”

The Prince wasn’t sure whether or not he was about to make a fool of himself in circumstances he hardly understood. “Well—  Poetic springs or not, if anyone’s suggesting that Bellerophon was out for a nice ride one day when the horse suddenly sussed that he was thinking ‘thoughts too great for man’, and simply chucked him off his back because of that? Strikes me as a bit too much ‘unusual’ at one sitting.”

There was a moment’s silence. “Prince,” the God said then, “I was right in my assessment of you. You are promising raw material. I emphasize the ‘raw’, of course—”

The Prince gave him a look of dry amusement. “Well, thank you. I think. But there have to be a hundred things a lot more likely than hubris to make a horse buck someone off suddenly—even an experienced rider.”

“Exactly. Which is why I wanted you to have a close look at the party in question.”

They paused before the last stall at the end of the walkway, one of the biggest ones in the place.  Inside, its ears pricked forward and gazing thoughtfully out at them, was a beautiful pale slim-legged steed, quite tall for any horse, long in the body and big in the chest—but then that was to be expected, with the extra musculature that went with those wings. The Prince had half expected they’d be laid down along his sides, but the horse seemed to prefer carrying them folded vertically, at least in the stall. The tips of them crossed nearly a spear’s length behind his tail, which was cut blunt and relatively short. His mane was cut short in the classical Athenian “crewcut” style famous from sculptures; also probably a smart choice, the Prince thought, for a beast who spent his days in midair. The face was long and slender, the muzzle narrow but not dished like those of some high-end Eastern horses the Prince had seen in his travels. It was a noble, clean-lined head, with a calm, intelligent look about the eyes: the kind of face you would expect on a horse associated with the Muses.

The Prince had seen a lot of handsome horses in his travels, but this one was beautiful in ways that had nothing to do with the wings… though of course they were a feature. “Just look at you,” the Prince said softly, “you gorgeous thing! You are just half as high as a house, aren’t you?” He unlatched the grilled top of the stable door, swung it inward and and leaned in over the lower half-door, reaching out a hand. Pegasus made a small uncertain muttering noise in his throat and sidled a little way over, looking at the God and the mortal sidewise. “Just about anybody’d need a mounting block to get all the way up there. You big handsome guy…”

“Prince,” the God drawled from behind him, “please stop before all these sweet nothings start making me think that those stories about life down on the farm do indeed have some _factual_ basis.”

“Excuse me?” the Prince said. “As I recall, my God,  _you_ were the one who deduced Lord Chrysaos and the donkey. Facts about which until then I was blissfully ignorant… so ta very much for _that_.”

The Prince could clearly feel the God going briefly all nonplussed under his shadows.  He smiled half a smile. “Meantime, you can’t just go plunging into a horse’s stall if you want to work with it,” he said. “Any horse. The niceties have to be observed. And possibly more with this one than usual.”

The God made a small, not-entirely-mocking half-bow. “Your patient, my Prince. Just—” He glanced toward the front doors.

“Quickly,” said the Prince. “Right.”

He slipped the catch on the lower half-door, opened it a little way inward and stepped into the stall, minding where he put his feet in the straw: but it was clean. “Fasten that behind you,” the Prince said to the God, his attention on the stallion, his hands out for it to snuff. “Wouldn’t want him to bolt past us.”

But Pegasus stood quiet as the God latched the door, and then dropped his muzzle into one of the Prince’s palms, lipping it. The Prince reached up to take the horse’s head, ran a hand along his neck and down toward the withers. “There you go,” he said. “Good lad. You are just the color of moonlight, look at you…” He glanced at the horse’s belly. “And look at that. He’s _blue_ underneath.” It was a light milky blue, almost pearlescent, like the sky on a day when the heat-haze runs high; it shaded delicately up into the white of his back and sides. The same pale blue was on the bottom sides of Pegasus’s wingfeathers, and on his points at nose and ears. “Why would that be, I wonder?”

“Camouflage?” the God said, looking over his shoulder up toward the far doors. “Perhaps a way to keep him from being seen clearly from the ground when he’s day-flying.” 

“You might have a point there,” said the Prince. “All right, hold still, handsome…” He went down with a little trouble on one knee and ran his hands down first one foreleg, then the other, while above him Pegasus started nibbling at his hair, then at the back of his tunic. “Oh, cut that out!” the Prince under his breath, amused.   

“Is it normal for him to bite you like that?” the God said, sounding curious.

The Prince laughed. “That’s not biting,” he said, standing up. “Believe me, you’d be hearing all about it if he’d bit me…” But increasingly the Prince felt sure that biting wasn’t going to be a problem. There were some horses—just as there were some people—who would make it plain to you immediately whether they were going to be difficult to work with. Pegasus plainly had no intention of being a hard case, which under the circumstances struck the Prince as a good thing, as the God had his eye on the far door again.  

The Prince stood up. “You said the staff were gone for the evening,” he said.

“So they should be,” said the God, “but the conditions are unusual…”

It was with the greatest difficulty that the Prince didn’t laugh out loud. “Yes,” he murmured as he worked his way down the horse’s left side, tapping him gently on the wing-shoulder to get him to cock the soft warm wing a little further up out of the way. “I’m locked in a high-end stable on Mount Olympus after hours with a nameless God, doing a physical on an immortal flying horse. As you say. _Unusual_.” 

The God’s smile stirred inside his shadows again, equal parts annoyed and amused. For the moment the Prince ignored it, running his hands down Pegasus’s flank toward the rump—  “Wait,” the Prince said, “what’s this?”

He paused. There was no missing the hard hot lump under the skin, and as the Prince touched it Pegasus whinnied and stamped.  The Prince stopped and reached sideways to stroke his shoulder. “Don’t fuss now, hold still. Sh, sh, sh…”

The God produced a small down-the-nose laugh. The Prince gave him a look. “What?”

“Nothing,” the God said. “Later.”

“Fine. Hold his head,” the Prince said, his attention on the horse’s flank.

“With what?”

“Just grab his forelock and some of the mane further down his neck. He’ll stay still.”

The God did this, though not without throwing the Prince a bemused sidelong look, possibly secondary to being ordered around by a mortal. Pegasus rolled his eye at the God, then dropped his head and started nibbling on the lapel of his cloak. The red eye there began regarding the horse with a slightly jaundiced expression. “Stop that—!”

The Prince chuckled. “Nervous habit,” he said absently, rubbing over the other flank and not finding anything similar there. “These high-strung fellas do that. Tap him on the nose or blow in one nostril; he’ll stop.” He came back to the withers on the side where the bite was, ran his hands carefully over them again. Then he shook his head. “Nothing. Just this thing…”

He stood back for a moment, biting at his lip and thinking. Then the Prince went back to the horse’s flank for another look. “You’re good with shadow; any good with light?”

“Actually,” said the God, “ _very_ good.” He let go of the horse’s head and stepped over by the Prince, pulled off his right-hand glove and brought up a long slender-fingered hand, pinching the thumb and index finger together. A little spark of light flared between them.

“Fine. Hold his mane again with the other hand. Good. Now, light right there, please—” The Prince indicated the spot where the swelling was.  

The God held his hand closer to Pegasus’s flank. Very gently the Prince ruffled back the tight hairs of the horse’s hide over the site of the swelling, looking, feeling—

 _There. A little tight new scab, still soft._ The Prince pointed. “See that? Just that little pinpoint.” He scowled, though, because the tiny scab wasn’t in the center of the swelling: it was offset. He ran his fingertips over and past the center of the swelling; then felt what he was looking for, just the other side of the most swollen point. “There,” the Prince said. “A second one.” He kept stroking his fingertips around, but after a moment shook his head: there was nothing else to feel.

“Almost like a thorn…” he said. “But a thorn would have left a scratch sideways, not a puncture like that. It’s like—” The Prince turned, stared at the God. “Like a snakebite.”

The God turned his head toward him, a sharp look in his indistinctly-seen eye. “I may not be an expert on equines generally,” said the God, “but it strikes me as unlikely that any horse would let a snake simply crawl up its leg and bite it.”

“You’ve got that right,” the Prince said, thinking of the time his Father’s warhorse had surprised an unusually clueless adder that had simply been sunning itself out in some long grass near his pasture’s edge. From the very second the adder had moved, just trying to get away, there had been crazed neighing and jumping and stomping… a whole _lot_ of stomping. Strix had been a nervous wreck for hours. “So, my God,” the Prince said, “I’ve got another question for you. Just how in Hades’ name did whoever looked over this horse miss this when they were looking him over? It’s the size of a quince.  And it has to have gone _down_ over the last few hours.”

“How indeed,” said the God. “Well, the people acting for the Investigator’s office are imbeciles, as you’ll find out soon enough. Perhaps they thought it came from something mundane, like a horsefly.”

The Prince shuddered: he wasn’t at all fond of biting insects. “Any horsefly that could do _that_ wouldn’t be one I’d want to meet in a dark alley.”

“True. But more to the point, how did he come by that in the first place? If not on the ground—” The God turned toward him, eyes catching the torchlight even through his shadow. “Then he got it in the air.”

The Prince gave the God a look. “Sorry? A snake bit him _in the air??”_

The God shrugged. “Eliminate the impossible,” he said, “and what’s left, improbable though it be, must be the truth.”

That made a cockeyed kind of sense in the abstract, but the Prince was still having trouble with the concrete version of the concept.  “Well, fine, then,” the Prince said. “So all we need now is a _flying snake.”_

The God was silent for a few moments. Then he started to grin—his shadows rustled with it. “Akontion,” he said.

“A what?”

“Akontion. It can’t be anything else!” The God clapped his gloved hands together, turned and started pacing up and down the stable.

The Prince and Pegasus regarded this display with interest. “Are you telling me,” the Prince said, “that there actually _is_ a flying snake?”

“In Italy they call it jaculus.” The God glanced around him, up, down, around, seeking something. “Nasty little winged serpent, venomous in the extreme. The poison would do for you in a second, you being mortal. But Pegasus is _not_. The venom wouldn’t have killed him. Might have made him sick. But certainly would have stung worse than any hornet—”

“I had a hornet sting a mule I was riding once,” the Prince said. The memory was vivid: the bucking, the sunfishing, the angry yelling—though that had been as much from the Prince as from poor Dolikë. “Threw me halfway to Ephyre: I was lucky not to break anything. And the poor beast was crazy with the pain for half an hour, just couldn’t stop running…”

“So imagine that happening in midair,” the God said. “Bellerophon’s an excellent rider.  Superior strength and reflexes, pretty much what you’d expect from a demigod. But when this happened, what Pegasus did was violent enough for him to lose his seat. Lucky he _is_ a demigod and wasn’t too high, or we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

“So if this wasn’t anything to do with some nebulous ‘will of the gods,’” the Prince said, “it was an accident…”

“Oh no, Prince,” said the God softly. “Not an accident at all. _Murder.”_

The Prince stared at him. “What? _How do you murder someone with a flying snake?”_

“Exactly what we need to find out,” said the God, and his voice was alight with excitement. “And to determine that, we need to find the murder weapon, because without that we can’t prove it’s murder, or find Bellerophon’s killer.”

They stood there quietly for a moment in the dimly moonlight-silvered straw while the horse rustled its wings and eyed them. The Prince was completely out of his depth now. “And how’re we supposed to do that? _He_ can’t talk, I take it.” He patted Pegasus’s side. “Though, being that you’re a God—is there any way that you—”

The God let out an annoyed breath. “Prince, no question I’m able to read those around me quite deeply. You’ve seen.” His darkness met the Prince’s eyes. “And in the deeper mode, mortals are by far the easiest; they know so little about how to guard their minds. But both mortals and immortals give themselves away every moment simply by the way they move;  and what they said last and how they said it reveals the way their stream of consciousness is flowing.” He threw Pegasus an annoyed glance. “ _This_ , however, despite its wings and immortality, is a horse… and I’m afraid what horses think about is outside my specialty area.” Though even as he said it, the God sounded as if the concept that _anything_ was outside his specialty area annoyed him a bit.

Pegasus chose that moment to stretch his neck out, lower his chin onto the top of the Prince’s head, rest it there, and gaze at the God. The God’s shadows suddenly stirred with a hidden smirk, and the Prince sighed. Even though this was Heaven, he’d been wondering how long it would take for the first height joke to be cracked: this one had been a favorite of Strix’s too.

“Very funny, thanks so much,” the Prince muttered, and put an arm up to hold the horse’s head while he moved his own out sideways from under it.  But something occurred to him then, with the thought of Strix and his encounter with the adder, which had caused unexpected problems in the days that had followed. He straightened, stroking Pegasus’s big broad shiny cheek, and looked over at the God again. “You know, though,” he said, stroking Pegasus’s neck, “even if they can’t talk, horses have pretty good memories. Take one back to the spot where it had an accident and you’d better believe it’ll let you know.”

The God looked sideways at the Prince out of his shadows. “This horse is evidence in a criminal investigation. If we take him out of here, the Investigator’s likely going to be quite annoyed.”

“But if we _don’t_ take him out of here, there’s going to be no chance of you finding that murder weapon.”

They looked at each other in silence for a few moments, pale eyes out of shadow, blue eyes the same. Then the Prince raised his eyebrows.  “You can of course ride—”

The God straightened himself in amused scorn. “What would you expect?”

“Fine,” said the Prince, and glanced around. Various items of cloth and leather and metal were hanging up on the back wall of the stall. “Let’s get him sorted. Chest band, bellyband, top and bottom bands to keep them from shifting: then the pad that tucks under the belly and chest bands on top.”

The tack was tidily arranged on its wall-hooks, which immediately made it plain to the Prince that this stable was indeed in Heaven: every other one he’d ever seen had always been a tangled, confused mess, no matter how often it was reorganized. He thought with a quick flare of sadness of Strix’s stall back home as he got busy fitting the chest band and fastening the buckle of the front crosspiece.

The God had just pulled down the bellyband and was examining it—then paused. “Something’s missing here,” he said, thrusting it under the Prince’s nose. “Look!”

The Prince put a hand out to feel the bellyband, stroking down the rough side and coming across a set of bumps on the underside of the band. There were holes, four of them: two near what would be the top of the band as it sat on the horse, two of them maybe a cubit further down.

“These were roughly punched with a knife or an awl,” the God said. “Most likely Bellerophon did it himself so that something could be tied on here. Perhaps a bag—”

“Makes sense,” said the Prince. “If you were riding a flying horse, it wouldn’t seem smart to wear a shoulder wallet—you know, one of those messenger bags.  It’d flop all over the place—” The image of a hawk wheeling in the sky came to him. “Pull you way off balance when you turned. Anything you carried would have to be fastened down.”

“Well, this one wasn’t well enough fastened to make it back from its last trip,” said the God, sounding both annoyed and excited. “And the investigators didn’t even notice where it had been, or realize it was missing. All they brought back was him and the tack that was still on the horse. Idiots!” He flipped the bellyband over, running his hands over it again. “Damn it, where’s the thing got to? We have to find it!”

“And you’re sure they didn’t bring it in with him….”

“No,” said the God, turning away and scanning every corner of the stable as if he still wished it might turn up buried under the straw. “They said as much in my hearing.”

“Come on then, let’s go find it. But we need one thing first.” The Prince glanced around the stall for that last piece of very necessary equipment—then laughed softly, shaking his head. “Look there….”

It had been under all the other tack, and now that everything was on the horse it hung revealed, shining more silver than golden in the moonlight. The Prince reached up, lifted the bridle down from its hook. Faint as it was, the diffuse light from the high windows slid and glinted along the bridle’s cheekpiece and headstall as the Prince stretched it between his hands.

“Pallas Athene herself made this,” said the Prince, shaking his head. It was amazing to hold such a thing in the hands: four colors of gold spun thin as thread, then woven and braided tight in beautiful patterns—impossibly as flexible as silk, and just as impossibly no heavier than leather.

He held it out to the God, who ran delicate fingers over it while still holding the light above it in the other hand’s finger and thumb. “Especially at the textiles-and-weaving end, she is the Queen of artisans,” he said, and the voice had a smile in it.  “No question, my Mummy does beautiful work.”

The Prince’s eyes went wide. “Sorry. Your _M_ —Grey-eyed Athena is your _Mummy?”_

“One of them,” the God said.

The Prince opened his mouth and shut it again.  Then he found his composure once more, in a hurry, as he heard voices outside the stable: not close, but close enough.

The God’s eyes went alarmed inside his shadows. “The Investigator,” he said.

The Prince glanced out of the stall, fitting the golden bridle and feeling around the horse’s head as he pulled the straps into place. “Back door?”

The God nodded, opened the stall doors wide and made for the doors at the near end of the white stone walkway. “I can hide us as we leave: they’ll know what’s happening but they won’t see who’s doing it.”

“But they’ll have an idea, I bet.”

“Not right away. For one thing—”

“Look, don’t explain why right _now_ , all right, just get those doors open!”

The God went to pull back the bolt on the stable’s rear doors, levered them open. They gave into another courtyard, smaller this time. “Exercise yard,” the Prince said under his breath. “Mounting block, _perfect—!”_ For there was one just outside the doors, and he was grateful for it with a horse this tall. He pulled the horse over, jumped up onto it, and found his seat. It took a moment; when your steed had wings, at least some of the seating had to be done well forward of the second set of shoulders. “Going to be interesting,” he said, “this rig’s not built for two—” He  stuck his feet forward through the breastband, kicked his feet back and wrapped the ankles through the band again while the God stood there glancing from him to the inside of the stable, where the hollow sound of banging was beginning at the front doors.

“Bad time for second thoughts!” the Prince said, reaching out to him. “Get up on the block and _get your divine arse up here!”_

The God leapt up onto the block, took the Prince’s outheld arm and swung himself up on Pegasus’s back, settling himself just behind the horse’s wingroots. “The compliment’s much appreciated, Prince,” the God said, “but if you’d give me a clearer sense of what I should be hanging _onto_ —”

“Not the backband, it’s not meant to take the extra stress!” The Prince looked around him and nudged the horse forward with his heels; he responded instantly, as if they’d been working together forever, trotting across the exercise area. _The bridle’s doing it. Has to be. A good thing, because this isn’t going to the usual kind of ride…_ “Just grab my belt and hang on!”

They surged forward: Pegasus broke into a gallop, a somewhat disturbing event when just across the exercise yard was nothing but more walls and stalls.

Someone’s front was pushing up against the Prince’s  back, and arms went around his waist. The Prince shivered at the touch. _What am I feeling? I need less of that or I’m going to start having trouble—_

“The belt would really work better,” the Prince said hurriedly, glancing backward, seeing where the wings were going. “Grab that instead and get a good grip. Right, and sit a little further forward, or those wings’ll beat your godly brains out once he starts working them!” _Which let it please be soon, because that wall’s getting closer real fast_ — _“_ And if you were planning to hide us somehow, could you get on with that please?” 

“Oh— _”_  

The Prince paid no attention to any answer, kicked Pegasus harder in the sides, pulled back on the bridle and leaned far forward over the horse's neck as he would have with a jumper. “Right, my lad, _now!”_

He could feel the horse bunch massive haunch-muscles, get them under him, and _leap,_ spreading the wings—  And the leap kept going. The wings beat downward in a huge rush of air, and the leap not only kept going, but gained on itself, sailed upward. And upward on the next beat. And upward again—

Shadow whirled about them, settled in and cloaked them close like a localized fog as the wings worked and took them higher, and higher still. Underneath them the exercise yard circled down and away, the stables flattening out under them too, growing smaller; the back of Mount Olympus started rearing up behind, and chill air rushed past the Prince’s face and pushed his hair back as they worked higher and higher, up into the clear moonlight, with all Olympus at their backs, silver and white in the light of the Moon standing high over the world. As they rose the world of men started spreading out below and ahead of them, patchy indigo and deep azure in the moonlight, silver where lakes looked up or rivers traced it, charcoal-colored where forested mountains rose. The Prince gripped as hard as he could with his knees, and tried not to pay too much attention to the hands hanging onto his belt as they soared away from the base of the Mount and up into the night.

“Which way is Tiryns?” the Prince shouted to the God over the noise of the wind.

Pegasus banked smoothly sideways, westward. “I think he knows,” the God shouted back.

And the man, the God and the immortal horse plunged away together into the depths of midsummer night, heading for the crime scene.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	13. Of Two Night Flights and a Walk in the Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The God and the Prince continue hunting down a killer and visit the Big City, while their transport displays his Astute.
> 
> (Warnings for AI [animal intelligence], high flight [VFR-only], poisonous snakes [not on a plane], and breaking and entering [with intent to deduce.])

The Prince gazed down at what would have been his whole world—indeed, far more than his whole world—spread out beneath them in the deepening night as Pegasus headed southwest at the kind of speed a traveler, even a more conventionally mounted one, could only have dreamed of.  It was hard to believe that when the sun that had set an hour ago had risen, the Prince had been climbing up Mount Aroania with the expectation of being dead, or possibly something worse than dead, within hours. Now he was coming down from Mount Olympus on the back of a winged horse with a God riding pillion behind him, and he had not the _slightest_ sense of what to be expecting next.

And he grinned… because it was _fantastic._

“It won’t take us very long at this rate,” said the dark voice from behind him, rather loudly: the rushing noise of the wind around them was considerable. “I’d estimate he’s making easily 1500 _stadia_ per hour.”

“That much,” said the Prince half over his shoulder, also more or less shouting. He shook his head. “Why aren’t we being blown off him? Not even a storm wind could move this fast.”

“True,” the God sort-of-shouted back. “Either he has some way of counteracting the increased air pressure around his riders, or it’s something to do with the bridle.”

The Prince shook his head again, rubbing the reins meditatively with his thumbs where they looped between his forefingers and third fingers and down into his fists. Those reins felt warm in a way that reminded him strangely of the plain bronze pin; a way that had nothing to do with heat acquired from his grip, and should have been be impossible for metal. But a Goddess had been involved with this piece of work, and far more intimately than the God behind him had been with that little pin. The thought of spear-shaking Athena herself, not shaking any spears at all but instead bent intently over a workbench of some kind up at the back of one of those high white houses on the Mountain, tinkering away at this bridle just as the Prince might have done with some more prosaic bridle in the tack room behind the stable back at home… He smiled. It was one thing to fear and respect the Gods, but something entirely different to feel kinship with them.

As he’d also been discovering on other counts. The Prince gazed ahead into the far distance, where between the juncture of the Peloponnese’s greater and lesser peninsulas the sheen of the Argolic Gulf was now showing faintly in the moonlight. As he squinted a little to see if he could make out any sign of Argos in the left-hand, lesser peninsula, because Tiryns would be close to that, apparently Pegasus was doing some targeting too, and banked rightward a bit. A second later behind him he felt the God slither sideways on the back pad, then grip harder on his belt in reaction, trying to right himself—

The Prince threw his right arm out sideways behind him to brace the God, then  reined Pegasus leftward out of the bank for the moment. “And now I understand why your Investigator-people didn’t bother leaving anybody to guard Pegasus,” said the Prince over the wind noise. “Because you can’t ride at _all.”_   He was working very, very hard to keep the laughter out of his voice.

“Why would _I_ need to _ride_ anything?” the God said, positively garlanding the word “ride” with scorn. “I have the cloak for close work and the West Wind for long-range travel—”

“Fine. Right now all you need to know about riding is that more than half of it’s about gripping the barrel of the horse with your knees. If you start to feel like you’re slipping, grip harder.”

“All right,” the God said, sounding annoyed, “but I’m feeling as if I am going to be walking very strangely tomorrow…”

The Prince snorted, for he was feeling the early signs of this problem himself. “You and me both, my God. But I’m not complaining: believe me, he’s an easy ride for this speed.” Which brought up another concern. “So after we find this murder-weapon snake—then what?”

“We take the evidence immediately to King Proetus’s palace at Tiryns. That’s where Bellerophon is being cared for, and where the investigation is based.”

“Right. But one thing about that. Am I right to assume that the people who’ll have just discovered Pegasus is missing can send messages quickly, the way you do; with those letters in the air?”

“Texts? Of course they can.”

“So having found evidence that this was a murder will be enough to keep us out of difficulties with your ‘authorities’ for having stolen Pegasus?”

“Oh, Prince, don’t be ridiculous. Only property can be stolen. Pegasus is a free being, not to mention an immortal. Nobody can _own_ an immortal, even if it’s only a horse. If anything, we _borrowed_ him.”

The Prince was skeptical, and also noted that the question on his mind hadn’t been answered.  “Hope your authorities see it that way,” he said. _Because honestly, however my day may have started, I’m not eager to have it end up with having to stand there and watch while the Heavenly Authorities tear strips off one of the more, well, unusual Gods in the pantheon._ He could just see himself standing in front of the throne of Zeus Cronion saying, _O King of Gods and Men,_ _I’m sorry, I should have tried to talk him out of it…_  

And then he caught himself grinning a little grimly, in the way that usually preceded getting into a fight he half expected to enjoy. — _Except that you wouldn’t say any such thing. First, because you’re not particularly sorry. Or what you_ would _be sorry about would be the thought of_ him _being in trouble in a good cause. Because if keeping an innocent mortal from being chucked into the wrong afterlife isn’t worth risking something for_ — _which the God here seems to think it is—then what’s the point?_

Pegasus chose that moment to bank a little leftward. And suddenly the God’s grip on the Prince’s belt was once more sliding rather further forward, and his voice was closer. “You’re concerned about what having ‘difficulties’ with the higher-ups might look like.”

“It’s all right,” the Prince said. “It’s just that when the higher-ups have been known to chuck thunderbolts around when they’re in a strop, it’s good to know how heavy-duty the strop’s likely to be. And I did mention that the belt’s better to hang onto, right?”

“No need to repeat yourself, Prince. But I see no need to shout myself hoarse at you from halfway down this horse’s back—”

“When you can just shout right in my ear instead, yes, I got that!” _A little nervousness in that voice? And if so, well, why not? Even a God doesn’t magically become a rider just because you tell him to hang on tighter with his knees._ And the Prince bowed his head, hoping the gesture and the darkness were enough to keep private the smile he couldn’t quite restrain.

“Sorry. Is this better?” The voice was a bit less loud this time. Unfortunately it had also gone deeper as it had nudged up closer, and the sudden dream-memory of firelight off to his left-hand side and that voice speaking in his ear now ran softly down the Prince’s spine.

His breath caught, and then the Prince rolled his eyes at how distractable he seemed to be today. _But then again, this hasn’t been the usual day, not at_ all. He  concentrated on getting his breathing back to normal again.

“…Prince?”

“Fine, that’s better, thank you,” he said.  … _Not really a surprise, I guess, that the nearness or touch of a God would be profoundly affecting. Just… who knew it would be profoundly affecting_ this _way…?_ Fortunately what with the business of managing Pegasus, holding his seat tightly enough for two, and simply being torn between exhilaration and sheer terror at what they were doing, the Prince had plenty of things to distract him from mere physical sensation. The terror in particular was useful, but that and the frankly provocative warmth of the God behind him were just about evenly matched at the moment. The Prince found himself in the unusual position of hoping that he _didn’t_ become less afraid for a while.

Barely a breath later, though, it became clear that this wasn’t going to be a problem, as without warning Pegasus tilted his nose downward and they started to lose some altitude. The Prince abruptly found himself very busy bracing against the bellyband as he’d have had to do with a horse plunging down an increasingly steep hill. And though the God was now pressing even more tightly against his back, the butterflies presently jostling in the Prince’s gut for his attention had nothing to do with anything but their angle of descent and the speed at which they were descending.  Thoughts of Miki’s long-ago tale of Daedalus’s poor son Icarus flashed most unwelcomely through the Prince’s head; he pushed them aside at the sight of the u-shaped northern coastline of the Argolic Gulf rushing rapidly toward them, and a patch of something foreshortened but oblong just inland from the Gulf, pale in the moonlight.

“Tiryns,” said the God in his ear. He didn’t sound entirely calm about the angle of descent either.

“That’s right,” said the Prince, concentrating on staying calm. He’d passed through the neighborhood years back when campaigning with the Kingdom’s small forces as part of the larger pan-Mycenaean alliance; and though he’d obviously never seen the fortress’s huge outer walls from this angle, there was no mistaking them. A long flattish bluff ran along the eastward edge of the Argolic Gulf below them, and all along it lay the fortress of Tiryns, its walls looking like the outline of a long-winged sycamore seed rendered in pale stone—two long lobes connected at a narrow waist. The Gulf’s dark water ran nearly up to the fortress’s walls on the west side, and they were flying low enough now to start hearing the muted rush of the surf even through the louder whine of the wind.

Pegasus was angling still lower, dropping speed. The Prince looked over his shoulder at the God. “Where did the investigator’s people say they found Bellerophon?”

“Seventeen stadia southeast of the Great Gate on the east side,” the God said.

The Prince nodded and eased the reins over leftwards. Pegasus instantly answered the touch, angling inland and still dropping altitude. The steady wingbeat was slowing, which made sense, but the Prince also picked up on something else: a slight shivering in the skin of the horse underneath him—the kind you might feel when the beast was attempting to shiver off a fly or other irritant that had settled on him.

 _Oh dear,_ the Prince thought. He leaned forward over the horse’s neck and reached up to lay his hand on it near Pegasus’s head. “Don’t throw a wobbly on us now,” he said. “Stay with us, you big brave beast, just hang on! It’s going to be all right.”

The horse’s ears twitched back toward him, and stayed angled that way: but the shivering in his skin didn’t get any worse.

“What’s the matter?” the God said.

“We’re close,” said the Prince, “and he knows it.” His heart had begun hammering: any normal horse in similar circumstances would very likely have been preparing to throw them. _But you’re not at all normal, so please be even less normal than that!_ “You’re doing fine, you wonderful creature,” he said as Tiryns slipped rapidly away behind, “just get us there and get us down, it’ll be all right—!”

Underneath them the wooded hillsides were now starting to circle up to meet them as Pegasus spiraled down, his skin twitching ever more tangibly. And then he did something that took the Prince completely by surprise. He came to a near-stop in midair, pausing on rapidly beating wings for all the world like a kestrel, flourished his hind hooves up behind him—incidentally pushing the Consulting God even more firmly into the Prince’s back—and then resumed his downward spiral.

 _My Gods,_ the Prince thought, _that’s where it happened. Right there!_ “He knows,” the Prince said, “he absolutely knows what we need!”

“It’s the bridle,” said the God, sounding surprisingly calm under the circumstances.  “I _told_ you my Mummy does good work.”

It took them at least another minute to land in the spot that Pegasus was targeting, a little scrubby vale between a sort of triangle of low rounded hills, fairly heavily forested in the local pine, spruce, and evergreen holm-oak. _If what we’re looking for came down in the trees somewhere, we’ve got a long search ahead of us…_ the Prince thought.   _And it’s not that many hours until dawn…_

He was distracted all over again by the flurry of far more rapid wingbeats that came with Pegasus’s landing sequence, and (in passing) by the thought that if Bellerophon had actually fallen from the height Pegasus had been maintaining  when he’d paused to kick up his heels, the durability of demigods was a whole lot greater than he’d ever have expected. And then the horse’s hooves touched ground, and he beat his wings a last couple of times, just lightly, as if to put the feathers in order, and folded them down.

“Right,” the God said, let go of the Prince’s belt, swung his long legs over to one side and leapt down for all the world as if he did this every day, and hadn’t just sporadically been clinging onto the mortal in front of him like some kind of dry-land limpet. “Come on, Prince, no time to waste, let’s find what we’ve come for!”

And within seconds he was plunging off through the low brush of juniper and myrtle that here surrounded them. The Prince simply sat there atop Pegasus for a moment, watching the shadowy form striding away under the moonlight. Then he disentangled himself from his seat and the chestband, dismounted, swung the reins down over Pegasus’s head, and just stood there stroking the horse’s neck for a moment and getting used to the feeling of solid ground underneath him again. The stillness, too, took a little getting used to after that incessant roar of wind. There was only the slightest breeze stirring the trees around them, and within a few breaths it had died back leaving nothing but silence.

Pegasus put his chin down on the Prince’s shoulder and let out a soft _whuff_  of relief: possibly understandable for a horse who’d just flown like the wind while carrying double for what had to have been the best part of seven hundred stadia. The Prince put up his arm on that side and held the horse’s elegant head to his for a moment, patting its cheek. “You,” the Prince said, “are a marvel, and that’s all there is to it. Noble creature.”

“Prince,” said the God from twenty or thirty paces away, looking over his shoulder, “less of the sweet nothings and more searching, please?”

The immortal horse and the mortal man let out more or less the same breath— faint amusement in one case, faint exasperation in the other. “Let me fasten you up over here and you can take it easy for a while,” the Prince said. He led Pegasus  over to a big, gnarled, heavy-trunked live oak, tied the golden reins around its lowest, heaviest horizontal branch, patted the horse again, and went off after the Consulting God.

The God was almost invisible in this darkness, a shadow in moonlight, going around in circles… except that he wasn’t. As he watched, the Prince realized that the God had begun slowly walking an ever-widening spiral from the spot where Pegasus had brought them down.   _There’s method to his madness,_ the Prince thought as he made his way over to join him. _And no madness really. It just looks that way at first glance…_

“The most direct path to discovery isn’t always a straight line,” the God said, as if the Prince had spoken aloud. “Don’t walk with me, Prince. Walk the opposite way, but match the size of spiral I’m walking. It’ll mean we have that much less chance of missing the snake. It should have some light markings on a dark background, if it’s like the ones I’ve seen mentioned in my research. And watch where you put your feet—if it got injured in the fuss after it bit Pegasus, the akontion might still be able to bite if you step on it. Is this enough light for you to be going on with?”

“I think so,” the Prince said. Slowly he started walking an opposite spiral path to the God’s.

They worked their way carefully around in opposite directions for a few minutes, the Prince paying very close attention to the ground at his feet. It was about half and half rocky pebbly ground and patches of short tough grass, with small scrubby plants and patches of random herbs popping up here and there. As he went, from somewhere a hill or two over the Prince caught the distant hoarse scream of a vixen. “Here’s hoping a fox or something hasn’t eaten it,” the Prince said.

 “Prince, believe me,” the God said drily as he walked his own path, “anything that ate an akontion will _not_ have got far. If you find something dead, our murder weapon’s probably inside it.”

“And if we don’t find anything dead, but just find the snake… what then?”

“Then we still need answers to two questions. One great, one small.”

“Small one first?”

“The one you posed: extremely obvious, but nonetheless quite important. How do you murder someone with a flying snake?  Not in the abstract: obviously it can be done. But how did _this_ murderer do it.”

 _‘Obviously,’_ the Prince thought, shaking his head. _It’s not obvious to me, but somehow I have this feeling it’s about to be explained to me so that it’ll be obvious afterwards..._ And strangely, he was looking forward to that. “Right. And the big one?”

 _“Why?_ Who would do that? Who has motive?”

“Three questions, really.”

“No, Prince, just one.” For a moment those eyes looked up from the ground and over at him, the moonlight behind the Prince catching in them even through the God’s shadows. “Motive is everything. All else flows from it. It can be deduced from evidence, but unless it exists to begin with, even the deduction may be in vain…” And the God sounded disturbed by that, as if by some possibility he refused to even think about.

For a while they continued spiraling away from each other, and the Prince concentrated on keeping his eyes on the ground and looking for something dark with light spots or patches.  “How big are these things usually?”

“Akontionoi? Half a cubit long would be the average,” the God said. “Some might run bigger, but it’d be unusual.”

“Half a cubit’s more than big enough,” the Prince said, and shuddered again. “I could almost wish I didn’t know about these creatures now.”

The God shook his head, plainly bemused. “Mortals,” he said under his breath. “How can anyone in their right mind possibly want _less_ knowledge?”

“Well, if you’re out in a field working and you know that the only place a poisonous snake’s going to be able to bite you from is the ground, it makes it a little easier to be prepared. Whereas now I’ve got to think about, I don’t know, the air, the _trees_ for all I know—”

“And how many people have you ever heard of being bitten by one of these creatures before?” said the God.

“Well, now that you mention it, none.”

“Which would tell you, Prince, if you’d taken the time to think it through, that the akontion must be very _specialized_ predators…”

The Prince frowned at the God’s smug tone. “Since I didn’t even know they _existed_ until a bit more than half an hour ago, and since I’ve spent the vast majority of that time riding a winged horse and keeping a tyro rider from falling off it, possibly it ought to occur to _you_ in the process of ‘thinking it through’ that I haven’t had a lot of time to spare for considering the issue.“

He could feel the God crack a very slight, very dry smile. “I’ll allow the objection,” he said, raising his voice, for they were fairly far apart now. “…But my point stands. The evidence suggests that they bother humans very rarely, and that datum alone in turn suggests that the akontion prefers to target smaller prey, in places a good distance from human habitation or normally unfrequented by human beings.”

“Bogs, or marshes maybe? Snakes do like cool places… and some lizards and such like damp ones.”

“Could be. But there’s no point in theorizing without data. A subject for further research, perhaps…”

And the God stopped suddenly, cocking his head to one side.

“What?” the Prince said.

“Do you smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“Something…” The God paused. “Something that’s only here once.”

The Prince shook his head. _“What?”_

 “Prince, seriously, try to _think,”_ the God said, sounding as if he thought his companion was being purposefully obtuse. “Or at least as a start, use your senses. What are you smelling?”

The Prince paused, breathed in a great confusion of cool fragrances: then closed his eyes for a moment. “A lot of pine… but there would be, up here. Holly-oak. Strawberry tree and juniper bush. And the usual herbs. Wild thyme, wild sage…”

“Yes,” the God said. “And about twenty other common plants of Peloponnese mixed-deciduous forest.” He was moving again now, and literally backtracking;  not turning, but instead slowly pacing his way in reverse along the spiral path he’d been walking.  The God stopped again, put his head back, breathed. “And the plants producing those scents are scattered all over, randomly… which is just what you would expect on a hillside out in the middle of nowhere. A relatively homogeneous distribution. However…” He took a few steps further back, then stopped again, breathed in. “I just caught a scent of something here… that’s only here _once_.”

The Prince blinked at that. “…The akontion?” he said.

The God moved a few more steps. “Impossible to say. I have no data on how they smell. But in our present circumstances, one must pay the utmost attention to anything out of the ordinary…”

He stopped again. The expanding spiral the God had been walking had led him close to the edge of the clearing they’d been searching, near where the trees began on the eastern side. The Prince began moving toward him, but the God waved an arm at him just once in a gesture that was almost savagely urgent. “Don’t move, don’t speak, hold _still_ , you’ll disturb the scent—!”

The Prince froze where he was. The God dropped his arm and stood again like a statue carved out of night, his head up, silent.

Then he moved again, toward the trees, one arm held out behind him, the dark-gloved hand beckoning. The Prince went after.

The God slipped into the shadow of the trees, the Prince catching up with him and following close behind, through a little copse of somewhat stunted beeches and past them into the shade of taller holm-oaks and strawberry trees that were first relatively scattered and then began to crowd one another. The God slowed, holding his hand back behind him again, motioning the Prince to keep his distance.

The Prince paused where he was, glancing around. There was little light to see by here; the trees’ branches were more tightly knit together overhead, and only the occasional dapple of moonlight managed to slide down through them and patch the uneven ground.  One or two of these patches lay off to his right-hand side, close together; one irregularly-shaped, one oblong and—

—entirely too regular. And on second glance the Prince saw that it wasn’t a flat patch of moonlight at all: it was the wrong color, more shadowy. Something lighter-colored than the scattering of leaves and needles on the woodland floor, something actually not only rectangular but three-dimensional—

The God, still sniffing the air, paused, and his head snapped around that way. “The bag!” he said, and made for it.

Going after him, the Prince finally caught a whiff of the scent the God had been targeting. It was faint at first but quickly got stronger; a sharp herbal aroma, pungent. _Now what_ is _that? It’s familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it._   The God reached down to the bag, about to pick it up… when the Prince saw it _move._

Instantly he launched himself at the God, knocking him back and away.  The two of them came down on the hard ground in a heap at the base of a gnarled old strawberry tree, a few cubits away from the bag.

The God furiously pushed the Prince off him and started staggering back to his feet. “ _What_ do you think you’re—”

Then he saw the bag start to twitch and heave where it lay on the ground.   _“…Oh.”_

“You may be immortal and all that,” said the Prince, pushing himself up to stand beside the God, still gasping a little with the sudden exertion and the fear that had flared in him, “but were you really going to just grab that bag and yank it open and shove your hand inside before you were sure what’s in there? Which I’m betting is a _live possibly angry and probably still very poisonous snake?!”_

The God was brushing himself off, also breathing a bit harder than before. “Point taken,” he said. He stepped over to the bag and stomped on it, hard—then leaned down and reached for it once more.

And once more it twitched.

Nonplussed, the God straightened up and stared over at the Prince. The Prince laughed a little shakily. “They die by inches,” he said. “Give it a few moments. It’ll stop.”

On common impulse they both retreated to what seemed at the moment like a slightly safer distance, and gave it more than a few moments while jointly looking the bag over. It was a relatively simple thing: pale cowhide with the hair scraped off, the flap at the long end fastened with a simple buckle, and the various leather thongs that had once fastened it to the bellyband snapped off at different lengths. “The Investigator’s people missed this in _daylight_ ,” the God said. “I just can’t wait to see them and tell them all about it.” His voice was rich with anticipation and rather malicious amusement.

The Prince’s mind was less on who the God was going to have a chance to embarrass in the near future than on his own embarrassment right now. “Listen, my God, sorry about that. I should’ve just—”

“No, it’s all right,” the God said. “You were… concerned.”

“Still. A bit undignified.”

“Quite,” the God said.

“I just thought you might be about to—”

“Naturally I wasn’t, I was just—”

“After what you did last time. _With the bear.”_

“Um. Yes. Well, what I then had in mind initially was to—”

“What, hit the poor bear with lightning or something?”

“Don’t be an idiot, Prince, only Zeus can use the thunderbolt.”

“So what, then?”

“Well, I’d thought that—”

“No you hadn’t,” the Prince said, and then just couldn’t help himself: he grinned. “You were just all incensed that the bear wasn’t respecting your godliness on sight. You went at it to teach it the error of its ways and you didn’t even have a plan yet—”

“You have _no_ data to give you a solid basis for any such deduction, Prince! And in fact if you would consider—”

“Probably I will, sooner or later, but by the way, remember the snake? …It’s stopped moving.”

“What? Oh. Yes.” A pause as the God brushed himself off a bit more and resumed some more of his dignity. “Thank you.”

“Welcome.”

Together they went back to the bag. As the God bent over it, the Prince unsheathed his sword, and the God glanced up at the soft rasp of it coming out of the scabbard.

“Just in case…”

“Of course.”

The God carefully undid the buckle of the strap that held the bag closed: then equally carefully eased back the flap over the top. The Prince lifted the sword.

No movement now. The God peered in, then nodded. “Just lift that out, if you would?”

The Prince crouched down by him, slipped the point of the bronze sword into the bag, eased it under the very squashed shape inside. Slowly he drew it out where they could see it, into the nearby puddle of moonlight, and shook it off the swordpoint there. Then he used the point to straighten it out.

The heel of the God’s boot had caught the akontion right in midspine; the pressure of the stomp had squashed its middle flat and popped its mouth open wide.  It wasn’t a thick snake, but the Prince knew a few that were deadly enough for all that they were slender. This one, at least in the moonlight, looked to be a dark blue-green with lines of bright spots down either side. And yes, there were the wings, thin and membranous, blue-skinned like the akontion’s body—long and sharp, a little like a bat’s, though they seemed to have fewer “fingers”.  The poison fangs were long and wicked-looking, back-curved like an adder’s.

The God looked at them closely. “Thick enough to pierce horsehide, I’d say.”

The Prince looked at them and shuddered. “No question.”

“Not a snake fan, Prince?” the God said, sounding a bit amused. “Odd, considering your calling.”

“The snakes that live in Aesculapius’s temples are one thing,” the Prince said. “They bring people useful dreams with cures for their ills embedded: they’ve got the Healer-God in them. I’d guess the only God in _this_ thing is Death.”

The God nodded, but looked distracted. He paused, sniffing. “And there’s the scent I caught… but it’s not the akontion.”

The Prince took a breath, nodded. “Something else in the bag, then.” He took hold of the bag’s upper side, pulled it a little more open and poked around inside with the point of his sword, not eager to put his hand in there in case any venom had been expressed from the akontion when the God killed it. “Now that’s interesting…”

There was a partially squashed bundle of some kind of plant material down in there, pushed right into the bag’s bottom. Using the sword’s tip the Prince managed to hook out a loosened sprig of the stuff, and brought it out into the moonlight too, laying it down beside the akontion. The sprig, about as long as his hand, had small oval leaves gathered thickly on a squarish stem, and a little cluster of flowers at the top: impossible to tell the color in this light, but it might possibly have been a pale violet. When the Prince lifted the swordpoint to his nose, though, there was no mistaking the basic scent.

The God was watching him intently as if waiting for some specific answer. “Vervain,” the Prince said after a second. “Not the usual kind that likes fields and dry ground, though. This is less common. It likes wet ground, swampy places—”

The God clapped his hands together and came to his feet in a rush. _“Yes!”_ he said, his eyes alight through his shadows. “Congratulations, Prince! You win this month’s botany prize and free tickets to _Gardeners’ Question Time._ Now come on, we’ve got to get to King Proetus’s house while it’s still dark!”

The Prince got up quickly too, dumping the herb back into the bag, then the dead akontion on top of it, and fastening it up. “Why? I thought dawn was the deadline. And we’re only a short distance away anyhow—”

“Because _that_ ,” and the God nodded at the bag, “gives us final confirmation that the akontion’s attack was part of its use as a weapon of premeditated murder, and not some kind of bizarre accident.” He turned, and the two of them started making their way back out from under the trees toward where the Prince had tied Pegasus up.  

“What, the herb?”

“Yes. An akontion has an incredible sense of smell: it’s what they use to hunt their prey in the wild. With it they can target prey creatures from miles off. And they’re attracted to marsh vervain—apparently it’s a natural inclination; it’s to be found where their prey live. Marshes, as you guessed. They prey on voles and frogs and so forth. ” And the God grinned inside his shadows, quite ferally: the Prince could practically feel it on his skin. “But here’s where it gets interesting. Somewhere along the line, someone discovered that the attraction to marsh vervain can be turned into an absolute fixation if you keep the akontion in a closed place with a bunch of the herb for several days. Once oversensitized to the vervain, an akontion will target on it, especially to a concentration of it, to the exception of everything else.”

The Prince could see where this was going. “And when it gets where it’s going and doesn’t find anything to eat there…”

“It’s likely to bite whatever else it finds handy,” said the God.

“A man,” said the Prince.

“Or a flying horse.”

“Ugly,” said the Prince, and shuddered. “…But you don’t hear a lot about people dying this way, though. Or about how to use this method to kill them.”

“No, because until very recently the knowledge had to pass from mouth to mouth,” said the God. “And when a God was asked to do justice on someone who’d killed this way, one of those lightning bolts you’re so fascinated with would pretty much shut that particular mouth and destroy the knowledge for that generation.”

“No great loss, I’d say.”

“Yes, well,” the God said, “unfortunately we now have this newfangled mass media thing that mortals call ‘writing’.” It wasn’t all _that_ newfangled, but the heavy irony in the God’s voice suggested that it might seem so from the divine perspective. “There are Gods who’re saying that Prometheus stealing fire for mortals wasn’t such a big deal:  it’s his passing out the alphabet to all comers that may wind up destroying civilization. And this sort of event could be used to confirm that opinion, since it’s more than likely that some mortal’s written down how to use this murder weapon, and someone else has read up on it. Now we just have to find out who...and why they’d choose to turn this technique against the local hero.”

Halfway across the clearing from them, Pegasus had his head down and was idly browsing on some of the wild herbs there. But as they got closer, his head suddenly came right up, and he stared at them, nostrils flaring. “Meanwhile, we have other problems. He’s not going to like flying home with this close to him.”

“It’s all right,” the Prince said. “Wait here for a moment. We’ll show it to him. He’ll get it.” He handed the God the bag and then went to Pegasus and undid the reins from the tree, then took him by the bridle. “Because this is not just some dumb mortal horse, is it?”

The horse ‘s nostrils were flaring: he looked from the God to the Prince. The Prince just held still and rubbed Pegasus’s nose for a bit, watching those eyes calm and come to rest on him with more intelligence than ought by rights to have been there in a normal horse. _It’s definitely the bridle. When you’re holding it, it makes it easier to get through to him. Or easier for the smarts in him to get out._ “We’ve got to get back to your stable, my lad: the one where you usually stay. But we’ve got to bring this with us, all right?”

He glanced at the God, who gently moved closer with the bag in hand. “It’s all right,” the Prince said, rubbing the horse’s neck soothingly, “the Consulting God’s killed it. It’s not going to bite you again, or anyone else. Look here.” He signed to the God with a nod, while hanging onto the bridle two-handed: there was no telling when if a panicked jump might happen, and this would not be the moment for the two of them to be left stranded out here.

But Pegasus stood still enough. His eyes were wide, his ears were back, and his nostrils were still working overtime, but he held his ground while the God held the bag open and let the horse see inside. “Dead as a doornail,” the Prince said. “And we’re going to make sure that whoever did this to you never does anything like it again. All right?”

Pegasus snuffled, made an uncertain noise down in his throat, and stamped, but that was all. “I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” the Prince said. “You’re just a wonder.” And he kissed Pegasus on the nose and flipped the reins over his head.

“Prince, _please_ ,” the God said, putting the bag down and lifting his eyes to Heaven, “you’re positively forcing me to think oh-the-poor-donkey thoughts here.”

“Oh hush,” the Prince said, and put his hands down to give the God a leg up. The God put his boot carefully in the Prince’s hands and half-jumped, half-scrambled up onto Pegasus's back.

The Prince tossed him up the bag and mounted up too, though he had to do some scrambling himself: the horse genuinely was ‘half as high as a house’, eighteen hands high if he was a finger.  “So. The Palace in Tiryns?”

“Of course.”

The Prince laced his legs through the chestband and made sure of his seat: then shivered briefly at feeling the bag sandwiched between him and the God. Even dead he wasn’t wild about having a poisonous snake pressed up so close against him. “I bet they’re going to just love seeing us turn up on their doorstep in the middle of the night.”

“I wouldn’t worry yourself about that,” the God said. “They’re not going to see us at all.”

_“What?”_

“At least, not until later. We have some looking around to do first. We have the murder weapon, yes. But motive can be slipperier to nail down… and we don’t want the Investigator’s people knowing what we’re at until we’ve got the evidence we need. …So what are you waiting for?”

The Prince shook his head in slight amusement. “You to stop talking?” he said, and pulled up on Pegasus’s reins.

Pegasus reared back, beat his wings, launched himself into the air; and they flew.

***

They went lower and slower this time, partly because the Prince knew they were close, and partly because almost as soon as they were up in the air he was aware that the horse was having to work a little harder at flight. “Glad I left the armor home,” the Prince said after a couple of minutes, when they were high enough for him to get his bearings and steer Pegasus back toward Tiryns. “He’s carrying enough weight as it is. Good thing I’m on the small side and you’re so lean: immortal or not, he’s not built for a lot of this…”

The God produced a near-silent breath of laughter down  his nose, then looked north-westward as they rode.  Night was near to having fallen as deeply as it was going to, this time of year: shortly they would be into the long slow twilight that drew across the world before dawn. “Bad time of year for this kind of deadline,” the God said under his breath. “Morning comes all too soon…”

“Pity you can’t—text, was it?—text Eos,” said the Prince.  “Tell the rosy Dawn it’s an emergency, and get her to slow down the horses a little.”

The God laughed a one-breath laugh, and there was a rueful edge to the sound. “No, since I put all those grasshoppers in her bed when I was little, she and I haven’t exactly seen eye to eye…”

 _How many Gods on Olympus has this God alienated?_ the Prince thought, and then shrugged: right now there was other business to attend to.  But he was half beginning to suspect the answer was somewhere between “most” and “all”. “We’ll just have to assume that dawn will arrive on time then,” he said. “Just how punctual are the Fates likely to be?”

The God simply looked at him out of his shadows. The Prince’s mouth went a little dry. “Right,” he said, “sorry I asked.”

The hills before them were already giving way to the townlands and more open field-country around Tiryns, and the sound and smell of the sea began drifting across to them again. “Where exactly are you going to want me to put him down?” said the Prince. “Ideally we don’t want to attract any attention if you want to snoop around…”

 “Inside the upper akropolis,” said the God. Tiryns was rare among even great cities of that part of the world in having two akropoli—one lower one for temporary buildings, the marketplace, and casual housing of citizens and tourists: and the greater, higher and more newly built of the two for the great Palace. The Prince looked down at the lesser one and considered with some amusement that nearly all his Kingdom’s main city would fit inside Tiryns’ lower akropolis.

The Prince nodded. “Always wanted to see how the other half lives,” he said, and laid the reins on the left of Pegasus’s neck to take him out toward the water, where they would be fewer possible viewers from the ground and the rush of the surf might cover the sound of the horse’s wingbeats somewhat.

They swooped a couple of hundred cubits out to sea and a couple of hundred cubits high, above the level of the upper walls and out of easy sight of anyone walking there. As they did, the wind from the Gulf caught under Pegasus’s wings and sped their glide up a little. “Onshore breeze,” the Prince muttered. “Shit. Just pray there are no mares in heat in those fields down there. They ought to be asleep, but it’s just early enough for some of them to—”

Shrill neighing came from the landward side below them. The Prince rolled his eyes helplessly and pulled down on the reins to get Pegasus to drop some altitude fast. “Oh, _marvelous_ ,” the God said, disgusted. “The sordid wonders of reproductive biology in full flower.”

“Somebody didn’t start praying fast enough,” the Prince said, pulling down on the reins to bring the horse down faster.

“I’m a God, Prince, _who_ am I supposed to be praying to exactly?”

“We’ll work that out later. Which bit of the akropolis were you after again?”

“See the two central buildings with the hearth vents? The first one has roofs on a level with it just to its right—”

The Prince pointed. “That one there?”

“That’s it. Upper right-hand corner as we’re looking at it, that’s the women’s quarters, put him down on the roof—”

“ _This is completely ridiculous!”_ the Prince said, keeping himself from bursting out into incredulous laughter only with the greatest of difficulty, not least because they were now low enough that they might actually be heard. “We’re breaking into the ladies’ side of a house in the middle of the night, of _any_ house at all, let alone a _royal palace?_ This is utterly indecent! Queen Hera is going to have _words_ with us, my God!”

“If my preliminary deductions are correct, there’s at least one person in there who’s not decent at _all_ ,” the God said, grim. “In any case I’ll take any potential issue up with Her Majesty during business hours, because if this turns out as I think it will, she’ll be sending us a thank-you note and a nice bottle of something before Apollo’s brought his team home today. Prince, hurry up, can’t you land this thing any faster?”

The ride got suddenly bumpier; _much_ bumpier. The Prince gripped the barrel of Pegasus’s chest with his knees for all he was worth as the God got a death-grip on his belt. “You know, ‘this thing’ has ears, and even if he can’t understand words, which I’m not so sure about, he _does_ understand your tone of voice, so _you want to be moderating that a little right now!”_

Then the ride got bumpier yet, but this was a side effect of the extra flapping that started to happen as Pegasus neared the roof and fought to slow down. Half a mile or so off to the southward, an absolute racket of neighing now broke out as mares whinnied excitedly for attention and a couple of outraged stallions started shouting the horse equivalent of “Lemme at him, I can take him!” into the predawn darkness.

“With a stallion in residence, the people here have to have heard that before!” the Prince said over the noise of Pegasus’s wings.

“Not at night, very often,” said the God. “Just make sure he comes down quietly!”

It was going to be a good trick, as the roof was stucco over wood, and it seemed likely the horse’s steps would sound through the ceilings below like a drum. The Prince concentrated on landing Pegasus as close to the edge of the roof as he dared, without putting him where he could be seen from the walls and watchtowers below. He leaned well forward and whispered to the horse, “Just let us down softly, brother, and ignore my smart-mouthed friend…”

And as softly as the Prince could have hoped for, Pegasus landed;  as lightly as a swallow, or at worst a swan. His hooves touched the rooftop with no more noise than if they had been landing in soft turf, and then he furled his wings and stood absolutely still, like a white marble statue of a horse. Only his head moved, swinging around so that he could look at the Prince with just one dark eye. And the message was absolutely clear: _Because you asked nicely._

The Prince ruffled the horse’s mane and grinned and swung down off his back, glancing around to make sure they weren’t somehow in a position where they could be seen from above.  “Just tie him up!” the God said, annoyed, as he slid off Pegasus’s back with the bag in his arms. “This roof’s the highest thing for miles around, and we’re the only ones here who can fly. This time of night, the only one who can see us is Selene—”  He cocked an eye at the Moon.

“Just tell me you haven’t put anything in _her_ bed.”

“Endymion, once,” said the God, “but I don’t recall any complaints about _that_.” And the wicked amusement in the voice made it impossible to tell whether the God was joking or not.  “Come on, Prince, tie him up and let’s get inside!”

There were gutters to carry away the winter rainwater, and exposed beams showing in them. The Prince bent down to loop Pegasus’s reins around one of these and make them fast. “We won’t be long,” he said in the horse’s ear. “I hope…”

Pegasus lipped his shoulder. The Prince patted his cheek and went after the God, who was making his way around the roof just inside its low parapet. “How are we getting in?”

“Stairs to the upper gallery over there,” the God said, pointing. “The ladies come up here to sleep on hot nights. In fact, that they’re not here should suggest what a state of turmoil the place is in tonight.”

They made for the dark oblong that marked the way down into the women’s quarters. “And you should stop wasting time worrying about what people will make of the noise of the other horses,” the God said. “We’ve got more important business, and besides, mortals are idiots already, and royal ones frequently twice the idiots of normal ones—”

“I _beg_ your pardon!” the Prince whispered as they made their way softly down the stairs.

“Granted,” the God whispered back, “but right now I can’t spare the time to work out what you’re apologizing for, so we’ll deal with that later, right now we have to _focus_ —”

The Prince  rolled his eyes, glad that this couldn’t be seen in the darkness. They both stood still for a moment at the stairs’ bottom, letting their eyes get used to the dark. Stretching away to either side of them was a long stone-walled corridor, and far down at each end of it, a cresset’s worth of torchlight: no more.

“All there’ll be are guards down at the bottom of the stairs to the gallery below this one,” the God said under his breath. “No one on this floor.”

“Fine. So what exactly are we looking for?”

“Something that doesn’t belong here,” said the God, sounding smug.

The Prince fiercely restrained the urge to smack the God smartly upside the head as he would have done with a troublesome younger officer in the field. _“Such as??”_

“Come on: this way.” The God gestured up to their left, and the two of them started making their way up the corridor in that direction. “And as for your question: I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Assuming,” the Prince whispered, “that the noble lady whose quarters we’re about to sneak into doesn’t scream the place down around our ears first.”

”The ‘noble lady’ in question won’t be here,” the God said. “Someone’s dying in this house tonight, Prince. Or at the very least, he’s lingering just this side of the Last River. And the very _last_ place the one responsible for that will be is upstairs in her bed with a clear conscience. _That_ person will be right down by the bedside, watching Bellerophon’s every breath. Not with any good intention, no. But the killer will want to know the minute that their vengeance has finally succeeded… when it didn’t work right the first time…” He let out a long breath. “In fact, such is the disruption to the household in a situation like this that I very much doubt we’ll find anybody up here at all.”

“But if somebody _does_ find us up here? Like some guard who comes wandering upstairs?”

“They kill whoever they find, naturally.”

The Prince stared at him. _“Excuse me?_ Surely you mean, ‘whatever _mortal_ they find!’”

He could just feel the God rolling his eyes through those shadows. “Well yes, if you’re going to be pedantic about it, of course, they kill _you.”_

For several moments the Prince couldn’t do anything but shake his head. “And what exactly happens when somebody sticks a nice sharp sword into _you_ , my God?”

“Ah. Well…” They were approaching the end of the corridor, where the cresset burned in a clamp in the wall; not a dead-end corridor, as it turned out, but a corner. The  God cautiously peered around it, trailing off as he doubtless began to conduct some kind of abstruse analysis of the architecture that would tell him the location of the rooms he was seeking.  

“Gods get sharp objects stuck into them all the time in the _Iliad,”_ the Prince said under his breath. “If I remember correctly, even the God of War caught himself a nice spear-thrust on one occasion. And now I come to think of it, I believe your Mummy was responsible!”

The Prince could feel the God smirking. “Yes, she was, wasn’t she? …Anyway, he isn’t a very _nice_ god of War.”

The Prince found it impossible to disagree. Ares was well known to be both a coward and a bully, and almost nobody among Gods or men could be found willing to go on record in the classical literature and say that they liked him at _all_.  “Regardless of that, immortal though he was, he still required speedy medical attention!”

“Yes, well, it’s lucky I have my physician with me, isn’t it?”

“It won’t be very lucky if someone’s _killed your physician!”_

“We’ll have to prevent that, then.”

“I’m so glad to hear that!” the Prince whispered. He was so torn between outrage and laughter that he could scarcely breathe. For the time being it seemed wisest to let the laughter win, because the outrage would simply do him no good. But there was also no avoiding the truth tickling at the back of his mind—that this was the most excitement he’d had since— _Since I can’t even_ think _when,_ he thought. _And I was riding a flying horse ten minutes ago._

“Three doors down, to the right,” the God said. “Come on.”

They slipped around the corner and made their way down the corridor. And then, to his horror, the Prince spotted it: the bloom of light down at the corridor’s far end, which had been briefly confused with the light from the cresset there but which was now strengthening—

The Prince grabbed the God and started to pull him back toward the corner they’d just come around: but there was no time. Down at the corridor’s end that light was strengthening every moment in time with someone’s footsteps, and now an almost blinding bloom of torchlight burst around the corner as a guard with a torch came around and the light streamed down toward them.

And then the God was shoving the bag at the Prince and unclasping his dark cloak and whipping it around them both and crowding them into the right-hand wall. They were pressed up against each other front to front with the shadow wrapped around them, and the God’s head was bent down so that the cloak could cover his head, and both their heads were turned sideways so as to stick out as little as possible, and the God’s dark hair was in the Prince’s face. All the Prince could think about was the way he could feel not only his heart hammering in his chest, but the God’s hammering too, and (irrationally) that right now the God’s hair smelled wonderfully of pine and spruce and strawberry-tree…

The light bobbed closer to them, passed right in front of them… and then went on past them and down the corridor, and around the corner to the right, and dimmed away again almost to nothing.

“Sorry,” the God said, so faintly as almost not to be heard at all. “We should move.”

“Yes,” the Prince whispered, while bizarrely not wanting to move at all, and being wholly unclear as to why, possibly because there were just too many things happening at once— “I’m sorry too, I panicked a little there. Forgot you could do that.”

“Wasn’t sure I could do it myself,” the God whispered back. “Nearer Olympus it had no choice but to work. Elsewhere, though, I’ve never tried it with two before, and I didn’t want to just jump away, it would’ve attracted attention, and time’s of the essence.”

“Seems to work all right, though.”

“Needs some more experimentation though…”

“Some other time. Shouldn’t we get out of the hallway?”

“Yes, yes of course—”

The God swung his cloak off again, clasped it around him. As quietly as they could they made their way in some haste down the hall the God had indicated. Silently the God lifted the door’s latch, peered inside. Then he beckoned the Prince in, shut the door behind them.

The Prince’s eyes widened as he looked around him in the dimness, which was broken only by the moonlight coming in the windows. Everywhere were rich hangings, elaborate carving on chests and wardrobes, and all over the place the dim moon-silvered gleam of gold: ewers, basins, rich jewelry left scattered about. He touched one tiny glint of gold in the darkness near him, a single pendant mulberry-drop earring—solid gold—left lying on a table by a deep soft couch. “Oh my God…”

“What?” The God was already across the room, where he had opened a large chest between two of the windows and was going through it.

“Not you,” the Prince said. “I mean, _look_ at this; look where we are. These have to be the Queen _’s_ rooms.”

“Your powers of observation are peerless, Prince. Well done, you.”

The Prince’s jaw dropped. “Wait. You actually suspect _Queen Anteia? Why_ would the Queen of Tiryns…”

“I intend to find out.” The God was going through another chest now. “But you see the problem? You know a little of how I operate, and you’re coming to trust my methods even now. Yet the very thought of fellow royalty being involved in a murder is difficult for you to accept… and you _know_ royalty.”

The Prince opened his mouth… then slowly shut it again. His family had its own problems, no question. Yet they were astonishingly simple problems, in fact downright dull, compared to those of some of the Kings and Queens and more troubled royal lines who featured in the stories that Miki had told him years ago. Murder, rape, incest, even (in one horrible case) cannibalism… Greek royalty was not exactly a hotbed of happy family life and mental stability.

The God lowered the lid of the chest he was searching in, moved on to another. “Gone,” he growled. “It was here, but it’s gone, someone’s moved it.” He stood, swept around the room, bending low, breathing: then straightened, made his way back to that couch; touched the bedclothes thrown over it, white linen, pale embroidered silk—

He lifted the silks to his face, inhaled deeply, then straightened, dropping them. “It was here,” the God said, his voice soft and furious. “And very recently, this very night, even perhaps this very _hour_.”

On a hunch the Prince dropped to his knees beside the couch, peered under. “What are you looking for exactly?”

“It would be small. Probably locked. A chest, nothing large, a little box or—”

The Prince straightened, put what he’d found up onto the couch and brushed the dust off himself as he stood. “It’s where my sister would always put her jewelry box late at night,” he said, as the God immediately reached down and picked up what the Prince had produced. It was a small locked chest of polished cedarwood, perhaps a cubit long.

“Clever, _clever_ …!” the God said softly, passing his hands over it. “Oh, _very_ clever.”

The Prince smiled. “Thank you. She never liked the idea that her maid could get at her things while she was in bed—”

“Not you, Prince,” said the God, reaching into his sleeve.  “The Queen. Look at the box. Cedarwood. The scent’s stronger far than that of the vervain, it masks it...”

About half the Prince’s smile fell off as his mouth quirked sideways in slight annoyance:  an expression that he was beginning to realize was likely to be sitting on his face a lot in this new life he’d entered. _Still… there are compensations_.

From the sleeve of the long dark tunic under his cloak the God had produced a long slim tool of some kind. Now he was fiddling with the chest’s little lock. He muttered under his breath. “Unusual. Normally these locks are practically useless. But plainly the Queen wanted to make sure that—”

 _Click!_ went the little chest’s lock in the stillness. The Prince licked his lips, his throat gone dry all of a sudden. It was astonishing how loud such a small sound could seem, especially when you were a burglar and fair game to be killed on sight.

 _“Now_ then,” said the God softly, and tucked his lockpicking tool away. Then he reached down and opened the chest’s lid like someone who expected to find it full of treasure.

The Prince leaned over to look at the contents. The chest contained nothing but a small bunch of half-wilted vervain, a few scraps of parchment, and a pair of small clay tablets, each held in a thin wooden frame about the size of one of the Prince’s hands: all of these lying on a lining of soft linen. The pair of frames had been held together on both sides with seals of hard red wax, but both seals were broken.

Each of these things the God lifted out, examined carefully, and set on the bed. Then, “Yes,” he said. “Yes, _now_ I see…!” And then, very slowly and gently, he removed the lining of the chest.

The Prince watched, bewildered, as the God unfolded the linen cloth, held it up. And the Prince realized after a moment that it was no lining made for any chest of such a size. It was shaped all wrong, and cut wrong too—too long for the chest by about half. It was doubled over the short way. _No, wait, stitched together—_

“Look,” the Prince said softly, and held out his arm to the God. The God met his eyes through his shadows, nodded just once; and though it was for the moment too dim for him to see the God’s eyes through his shadows, the Prince knew by his voice that they were alight.

“That’s right,” the God said. “It’s a _sleeve_. The sleeve of a man’s tunic. Very fine linen indeed, beautifully woven, made on the kind of loom and by the kind of craftswoman to be found only in a great house. And look—” The God held the sleeve up. Even in the faint moonlight coming in through the windows, the rough edge where the sleeve had parted from the main garment was visible. “It’s _torn_ ,” said the God, as if this were a condition to be aspired to, as if no garment could ever be right again unless it was torn too. “And just see here, how the fibers are stretched. The strain across both sides was strong, but far stronger on the garment side.”

His voice had dropped so deep and low as he spoke that under other circumstances it would have sounded positively erotic. “All right, plainly I’m missing something,” the Prince said. “Yes, it’s somebody’s sleeve…”

“Exactly,” the God said. “But not just _somebody’s_.  Oh, _Prince—!_ ” The excitement in his voice was contagious even though the Prince had no idea what it was about. “These first, though—” He put down the torn sleeve, pulled off his right-hand glove, and once more made his tiny thumb-and-forefinger light. With his other hand the God picked up the two leaves of the clay tablets in their little frames, holding the light over each of them and examining them with care, first one, then the other. Then he put them carefully down and picked up the first scrap of parchment, which by the light faintly shining through it the Prince could see was scratched all over with lines of tiny angular letters. He read it over, picked up the second. “They’re almost identical,” he breathed. “But _why_ would she—”

And then, as he held the little light over the middle of the second piece of parchment, the breath went out of the God almost in a gasp. “ _Ohh_ —”

He breathed in again, then turned to the Prince, eyes fierce with excitement, and snapped his light out. “Bring these,” he said, urgently pushing all the chest’s contents into the Prince’s hands. The Prince bundled everything hurriedly into the bag. “We’re nearly there but there’s one more thing we need, we’ve got to find Bellerophon’s quarters!”

The God turned in a swirl of shadow to look around the room one last time. The Prince made for the door with the bag tucked under one arm, lifted the latch and quickly swung the door softly open—

To find himself staring directly into the face of an armored and helmeted guardsman with a spear that was pointed right at the Prince’s breastbone.

“Not so much as a twitch out of you,” said the guard, “or I’ll run you through right where you stand.”

And the Prince held absolutely still. “Oh God,” he said, hoping desperately for some kind of useful answer.

But from behind him there was nothing to be heard but silence…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	14. Of the Case of the Fallen Rider and What Was Revealed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Prince gets the point and takes a pulse: the Consulting God makes his case: the Investigator puts his foot down.
> 
> (Warnings for shadowplay, memory deletion, a false accusation of rape, and airing dirty laundry in public.)

The Prince stood completely still, looking into the eyes of the man who was holding the spear at his chest.

It was a wholly conscious decision, a reaction learned long ago, the very first time he’d been sent with one other man to do a reconnaissance mission around the fringes of an enemy camp. He’d soon found himself in a situation just like this—a dark place, a guard with a spear all by himself out at the edge of his camp—but his older fellow-spy had prepared him for it. _No weapon that’s not being used on you is really a weapon,_ his partner had said. _An unused weapon is just a threat or bluff, a tool the other guy’s using to try to get you to hold still while he thinks. So use that against him, and think faster. His eyes will tell you. Use them against him. Sink into them and let him think you’re as scared as he is._

So the Prince did that for a breath’s worth of silence while considering his options. When a man had both his hands on his spear, and yours had no weapon in them, there were already endless possibilities. But tonight there was a possibility available that definitely hadn’t been so the last time this had happened… because in the still dimness of the room, a waft of air slipped past his nose that smelled of pine and spruce and strawberry-tree, and in its wake a breath stirred against his ear and said, in the faintest possible whisper, just one word: _“Stall.”_

Fortunately that was easy. The Prince didn’t move, just looked at the man who was holding the spear on him, immersed himself in his eyes. When he was ready, he’d drop the bag, and then he’d have a second, no more, to take the spear away from the guard. He was listening carefully for any sound of other footsteps in the corridor, but there were none. What _was_ in the corridor was a peculiar change in the lighting, a deepening of shadow, the very dim light of the cressets being blocked away—

The guard’s eyes darkened slightly. The Prince dropped the saddlebag. As the man’s eyes inevitably followed it, before it had even hit the floor the Prince was sidestepping to his right and forward, half-turning as he grasped the spear just at the blade’s socketing, at the same time balancing forward and kicking the guard right-legged in the armorplating over his gut to keep him in place while he finished getting the spear out of his hands. When the kick was done the Prince completed the turn on the right leg, reversed the spear, came around with it pointed at his adversary—

Around whose head there then immediately appeared something like a hood or mask of darkness that pulled down over his face, hid it. As it drew down over his face, the guard collapsed heavily to the floor and lay still.

That deepened shadow now shaded down once more into full blackness, the shape of the God kneeling on the floor over the guard. His hands came out from under the cloak to yank his helmet away. Then one hand tugged the other’s glove off, and he rested the ungloved hand on the man’s head.

The Prince crouched down by them. “What did you _do_ to him?” he whispered.

“Put him to sleep. It’ll last some minutes after we’re gone. Put his spear back in his hand; when he wakes up again he won’t remember us.”

“What? Why not?”

“Mnemosyne was one of my grandmothers. I can wipe memory clean, or alter it.”

 _“Oh,”_ the Prince said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have kicked him in the gut, then.”

“Yes, I was going to ask you why you felt the need—”

“Because I had no idea what you were going to do! You didn’t exactly tell me.”

“I told you to stall.”

“Did he move?”

“No.”

“Good, then you saw me stalling. When he saw the light change, that would have been when the stalling stopped working. So I took the spear away without moving him around too much, as I saw you getting ready to do something or other. Problem?”

“No.” The God sounded amused as he slipped the man’s helmet back on. “Entirely adequate. Meanwhile, he now thinks he fell over an amphora down in the storeroom earlier when he was pilfering some wine.”

The Prince chuckled while slipping the spear underneath the guard and folding his hand around it. “What a bad boy.”

“Yes. He thought he heard voices in here, but he’ll blame it on the wine, which was quite good, which is why he suddenly fell down drunk up here. Terrible thing, drinking it unmixed like that.” The dry amusement in that dark voice grew. “And by the time anyone who knows this room gets up here and finds anything amiss with it, it’ll be too late; we’ll have done what we came for… if we can find what we need in Bellerophon’s rooms. We needn’t ask directions. This one knew the way.”

“Next building over?”

“Around the corner at this corridor’s end, fifty paces down there’s a walkway over. Men’s quarters are in the gallery behind and above the _megaron_. Come on.”

The Prince recovered the dropped bag and softly shut the door. Then they went down the corridor in haste, a tall dark shadow and a man behind him using him for cover and trying to walk as quietly as one. “I thought you said there’d be no guards up here,” the Prince whispered.

“Another indicator of how disturbed things are tonight. Useful for us…”

“Even when it makes you wrong?”

“Prince! ‘Wrong’ is a value judgment.” Even when whispering he could hear the disdainful sniff in the God’s voice.

The Prince grinned to himself as they paused by the corner leading down into the corridor to the men’s quarters. At its far end another cresset burned: it was a tau-junction, another corridor reaching away to left and right. “Clear,” the God said.

They made their way down toward the cresset. They were just shy of the corner when they both started hearing footsteps again. “Damn,” the Prince whispered.

“Left,” the God whispered back. They both crowded that way, the God’s hands on the clasp of his cloak again. “Armed?”

The Prince listened as the sound of the approaching feet grew closer. Soft house shoes, not thick-soled ones with nails: and no telltale creak of heavy leather or its strapping—the other guard’s armor had been plate over leather, like his own at home. “No. House staff.”

“We’ll see,” the God said, pushed away from that wall, and went sweeping straight around that corner leftward, the Prince following close behind with his hand on his sword.

In the middle of the corridor a man stopped at the sight of them: tallish and stocky but dressed in nothing but a simple tunic, a belt, and woven leather shoes—a servant on some late errand. The God walked straight at him with the air of someone who had the right to be there. “Quickly, man, where are Prince Bellerophon’s rooms?”

“Down at the end of the hall, but, Lord, who—”

“Nobody at all,” the God said, coming up with the servant and taking him by one arm. With his free hand he brought up a corner of his dark cloak and stroked across the servant’s eyes with it, pushing him against the right-hand wall. The man simply sagged down against the wall to sit on the corridor floor and began to snore, a residue of darkness clinging about his face. The God bent down, pulled his glove off again, touched that face. “Nicely done,” he said. “You could indeed be taught...”

“This trick perhaps?” the Prince said, reaching a hand out to the dark fog clinging about the man’s face.

The God batted his hand away from it, put his glove back on. “It needs the cloak… and there are other considerations. Another time.” He got up and headed down the hall again. “Come on.”

“How long will he—”

“As before, just a few minutes… it’s all that’s needed. He never saw us; he ‘tripped’.”

“Hope these people don’t compare notes, or they’ll notice an epidemic of tripping...”

“They’ll have far more than that to notice before we’re done with them, believe me.” The God’s voice was grimly amused. “Here.”

From down at the end of this corridor a faint light from below was reflected in its left-hand wall: the great hall was down there, a fire plainly burning in its hearth, and the Prince could just catch a low murmur of voices. To their immediate right was another door like that to the Queen’s chambers—solid wood, bronze-bound at top and bottom. The God reached out, lifted the latch: or tried to. It wouldn’t move.

“Locked,” he said, unclasping his cloak. “Amusing. Hold still.” He whirled the cloak about the two of them, let it settle.

When the Prince could see again, he was in another dark place with only faint moonlight coming in the windows at an angle: it dimmed down suddenly as a cloud passed across the moon, a suggestion that the local weather knew dawn was slowly approaching. When you were by the water down here, the Prince knew from his campaigning days, low cloud and mist were a frequent early-morning feature.

“We’ve got more important things to worry about than the weather right now, Prince,” the God said, his cloak back in place and swirling around him as he turned in a quick circle, examining the room. “Focus on what’s in here.”

Slightly annoyed, the Prince did so. Even in near-darkness, these chambers were visibly as different from the Queen’s as could be imagined. Bellerophon’s quarters were unadorned, almost bare of possessions. Furniture too was at a minimum—a couch and its bedclothes, a wardrobe, a big chest by the bottom of the couch. Beyond was another room, its door standing open.

Clothes were scattered here and there over the couch and the chest. “The place has been rummaged,” the God said, sounding very annoyed. “But fortunately by people who as usual had no idea what they were looking for. A mixed blessing. They won’t have seen the one thing they need to see, but they’ll also have disarranged a hundred things I might have seen that they couldn’t…”

“And we’re looking for…?” said the Prince.

“Prince, do keep up! A tunic without a sleeve.” The God glanced around the room again one last time. “He won’t have put it away carefully, because it’s definitely not something he’ll have been eager to keep. But he won’t have disposed of it, either. He’ll have pulled it off him and thrown it somewhere out of sight, somewhere he wouldn’t have to look at it but where no one else would be likely to stumble across it…”

The Prince nodded and went to that chest at the end of the couch, lifted the lid, went through it; then left it and went to look in the large wardrobe up against the right-hand wall while the God was still going through the clothes scattered over the couch. There were plain tunics folded on a shelf in the wardrobe, but they all had their sleeves, and there was nothing else in there.

The Prince sighed and went through into the secondary chamber. It wasn’t very big: just the kind of room where extra wardrobes or chests might have been kept. There was a wardrobe up against the right-side wall, but the Prince found it empty when he opened it. The only other thing in the room was a big wooden-lidded hamper of woven withy strips half a hand wide. The Prince lifted its lid, peered inside.

He wrinkled his nose at the smells that floated up to him, though they still made him smile a little. Dealing with laundry in a big household, particularly a royal one, was always a nuisance. Normally it was allowed to pile up over a few weeks until the weather was right and housemaids could be spared to gather it all up, take it down to the local washing spring—or the seashore if there wasn’t one—and spend the day beating everything clean and laying it out in the sun to dry and freshen. His sister had once said to him that she became a Bacchante so she wouldn’t have to do the laundry. _Especially_ your _laundry. Those little cloths you use to clean yourself up…_

Suddenly he was there again, standing on the steps under the Palace’s podium while his sister’s ladies unloaded the clean linens from the mule cart. The faint smell of the olive oil used in the linen’s finishing at the end of the weaving process, which always came up strongly after it had been washed, was all around them in the hot sunshine. And he was standing there in complete mortification, because his sister would _not shut up._ “Oh, come _on_ , Iaon, do you think I don’t know what those are? _Disgusting!_ And stuffing them halfway down the basket fools absolutely nobody. In fact I’d have thought you were trying to impress the rest of us who were doing the washing with how many of them there were. If I didn’t know that you…”

“Thank you Arêtë,” the Prince said under his breath. Then he laughed softly at himself, because he couldn’t think when _that_ sentiment had last passed his lips.

And suddenly the God was in there behind him, looking at the basket. “What?”

The Prince jerked his head at it. “The place where you put something made of cloth that you aren’t going to dispose of but don’t want to look at or think about,” he said under his breath.

The God stared at the laundry basket for a moment. “All wrong,” the God said then, “wrong from beginning to end. He’d never have risked putting it in here. The household staff could have taken the laundry away without warning, in which case someone would have found it and perhaps started asking questions. And besides, the Investigator’s people have been in here, that’s why the room was locked, and they would have looked in every corner and…”

The God fell silent. Then _“Yes!”_ he said, and immediately took the lid off the withy hamper, handed it to the Prince, and dumped the hamper’s contents out onto the floor.

“Yes?” the Prince said, as linen in a wide assortment of shapes and aromas fell out all over the floor: tunics, underkilts, overrobes, loinwraps. The Prince leaned the hamper’s lid against the wall and stared at the God. “But wait, you said everything in here’s already been—what was the word? Rummaged?”

“Doesn’t matter,” the God said, getting down on his knees. Linens started flying in all directions. _“_ Prince, you’re a wonder, you’re right but for absolutely the wrong reasons!”

A loinwrap smelling of days-old heated rider and heated horse sailed past the Prince’s face, adding a wrinkled nose to the expression of faint annoyance that was bidding fair to settle in for a prolonged stay. “I thought you were just now saying I could be taught.”

“Oh, don’t look that way, your idiocy’s no worse than the national average, and _significantly_ less than that of the Investigators’ people.” More laundry flew hither and yon. The God was actually chuckling now. “They’ll have had it in their hands and they’ll have completely missed it. Or else they’ll have been thinking that maybe the thing was just being used for what _you_ were thinking about a few moments ago.” The Prince blushed. “Or they might even have thought that it was just some…” The God trailed off. _“Mending…”_

Slowly the God held up his hands. From them there hung a tunic of very fine white linen, and it was missing a sleeve.

“Oh, Prince,” the God said, and his voice once more dropped at least half a register with relish and absolute satisfaction. “ _Look at the tear.”_

The Prince did. “It’s pretty bad on this side.”

“Yes. He pulled away. He pulled away _hard_.” There was no mistaking the glint of triumph in the God’s eyes, even in this dimness, even through his shadows. “And you’ve just saved him from the Shades. Prince… what kind of tunic would this be, do you think? Where would you wear such a thing?”

The Prince reached out to stroke the rumpled linen. “Fabric this delicate? Not under work clothes, that’s for sure. You wouldn’t even want to wear it outside, really: you’d hate sweating in something like that, it’d discolor the linen.” That thought came to him vividly, as his Mother had often enough given him grief about ‘ruining his good clothes’ while he was growing up. “It’s the kind of thing I’d wear to a feast, under something casual but nice. Or…” The linen was truly very light, very fine of weave. He looked at the God. “In my chambers, in cooler weather. To bed.”

The God leapt to his feet, folding the tunic up. “We’re done. Let’s go downstairs.”

“Just like that?” he said as the God headed back into the main room of the Prince’s chambers. “How are we going to explain what we’re doing here?”

“That’s not going to be an issue, believe me,” the God said. “No one’s going to be interested in anything but the explanation we’re about to give them. Come!”

***

Two breaths later they had moved from moonlit dimness, to cloaked darkness, to the hot glow of firelight and the sound of many gasps of surprise.

The Prince had only a few moments to spare to glance around and take in the salient points of what was arguably one of the great wonders of the region, a truly massive throne room whose roof was held up by four mighty painted pillars. The walls too were painted with figures of men and beasts and Gods, all clear to be seen even this time of night due to the many braziers and torches standing about in the space and before the great empty throne against the eastern wall. In the center of it all was a great round hearth with a fire burning strongly in it, the smoke from it rising to vent through a high round hole in the ceiling. On the western side of the hearth a couch had been placed: and on it, with a light patterned throw tucked up under his armpits, lay a man, unconscious.

Two seats were set not far from him. In one, by the head of the couch, facing the fire, sat a grey-haired, grey-bearded man, broad-featured, hook-nosed and unhappy-looking, simply dressed in a long russet linen _khiton_. Across from him, in the seat with its back to the fire, nearer the couch’s foot, was a tall, auburn-haired woman, her hair bound back at the nape of her neck and flowing down the back of the patterned red and blue shawl she wore over her own dark linen shift and outer kilt. The Prince looked at her face and saw a woman who was beautiful in a soft and appealing way: round-faced, sweet-mouthed, hazel eyes set widely apart. _Dear Gods,_ he thought in some surprise, _she reminds me of Arêtë_ … But Arêtë’s face was a bit more worn with the outdoor life and their family’s own tendency, on both sides, toward facial lines in early middle age. This woman was almost Arêtë as she might have been with darker hair and a more conventional lifestyle. _Married into some royal house, the mistress of a great home, settled…_

And then the hair stood up on the back of the Prince’s neck as he compared that face against the story the Consulting God had been telling him, bit by bit, over the course of the night. There were still holes in it that he couldn’t quite fill in. But here was this woman, well born—she couldn’t be the Queen of Tiryns otherwise—educated, most likely powerful in her own right before she was married into this great line…

Yet what the God had told him this woman was part of was still hard to believe. Even with her face in shadow, Queen Anteia’s eyes looked puffy, red with tears and the wiping away of them. And it was there that a strange thought came into the Prince’s mind. _Sorrow, yes, for a guest whom tragedy had befallen. But these are a bit more than the tears of one who’s merely a hostess, surely, the wife of Bellerophon’s patron._ There was something around the edges of that expression that he didn’t quite understand or trust…

“What are _you_ doing here?” said a male voice from behind him.

The Prince turned. From among the scatter of servants and house staff in the throne room, the Prince saw a dark-haired young man wearing a peculiar narrow, annoyed gaze and a dark tunic and coming toward him and the God. The newcomer was an immortal of some kind or other, though the faint tremor of bright air about him was much less than it had been with Mrs. Hudson.

“Cleaning up your mess, Andreidês,” the God said, “as usual. And is— Yes, of course she is, it never rains but it pours! Surely you’re up well past your joint bedtime, Archyngeïs.”

“We were just leaving, and you can just do the same,” said the pretty dark-skinned young nymph, also dark-tunicked and kilted, who’d come from down by the great doors at the end of the throne room to favor the Consulting God with an expression that was profoundly unimpressed. She turned the same look on the Prince.

“Not likely, seeing that I was invited here,” the God said to her. “As well you know.”

“Thought you were all done with everything much earlier,” said Archyngeïs. “Especially after the way you stormed out…”

“I had a prior engagement,” said the God, “for which your incompetence had made me late. Fortunately I’ve managed to salvage that situation, and now I’m about to salvage _this_ sorry one, for which you’ll doubtless never work up so much as a grain of gratitude. Come on, Prince, the Work calls; let’s be about it.” He turned.

“Wait, who’s this?” Archyngeïs said, nodding at the Prince.

“My colleague,” the God said. “Prince Iaon Dasosarchëidês: Archyngeïs Atlanteidë, with the Investigator’s office at the Yard.” He indicated the other immortal. “Her partner in endless incompetence, Philippos Andreidês.”

The Prince gave each of them a courteous bow of the head. Andreidês just gave him a glare, turned and walked off toward the doors again. Archyngeïs stayed where she was, but eyed him, the Prince thought, rather disrespectfully. “A colleague,” she said to the God in apparent disbelief. “How do _you_ have a colleague?”

“The Fates move in mysterious ways,” the God said softly, “as you’re about to discover in a far more personal mode. I’m _so_ glad to have caught you before you left, because either you or Andreidês had the solution to this case in your very hands earlier today and didn’t even know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why, when you were up Prince Bellerophon’s rooms together,” the God said, “doing what passes for crime scene investigation. But the scene that the two of you had in mind was something else entirely.” He shook his head. “That cheap hot-pressed oil he rubbed you down with after your last bath together? In your place, dear Father Zeus save me from any such position, I’d tell him you deserve better, Atlas’s daughter.”

And he left the nymph gaping and swept away past her toward the two chairs set by the couch. “Your Majesties,” the God said, as the chairs’ occupants looked up at his sudden darkness. “If I might just have a few moments of your time to clear up some unfinished business, while the physician looks Prince Bellerophon over….”

The Prince raised his eyebrows and started heading over to where the God stood by the couch. The King and Queen looked at each other, confused. “Unfinished?” said the King. “The Investigator’s assistants were about to leave…”

“Yes, of course they were,” the God said. “But unfinished, yes…” The God’s gaze dropped to the unconscious man on the couch. “In this mode, at least.” And the Prince caught a glimpse of those eyes through the God’s shadows in a mode he hadn’t seen before: cold. The glint of them sucked all the warmth out of the firelight that caught in them, turned it silver and chill. “Though one might say, is great Themis’s business ever truly finished? Well, at the local level, it’s certainly not done yet tonight.”

Something cold ran down the Prince’s spine at that look, and what he felt building behind it: and away in the corners of the room, he could feel the shadows already there starting to thicken. Quietly he turned to make his way back to the minor Goddess who was watching the Consulting God with such loathing. “Madam Archyngeïs—”

She turned, and the gaze she brought to bear on him was not at all welcoming. “What?”

For his part the Prince simply kept his back straight and gave her back nothing but the calm look of royalty, and the assumed expectation of obedience. “I know you’ve never laid eyes on me before tonight, but if I could venture a suggestion…?”

“Well?”

He glanced around at all the servants around the edges of the room. There were somehow more of them in here now than there had been just a few minutes ago. “Considering the way news travels in a princely house,” the Prince said, “and then outwards… I would strongly suggest that you cause this room to be cleared before King Proetus finds fault with your failure to do so. And by extension, with your superior’s.”

She looked at him and opened her mouth, he thought, to object… then, glancing around them, took in the slowly gathering crowd, which was already four or five or ten people stronger. Household servants seemed to be coming out of the walls, and their faces were intent, every one of them turned toward the scene by the central hearth.

Archyngeïs let out an exasperated breath, as if admitting that the Prince had a point would have seriously annoyed her. “All right,” she said in a clear, carrying voice with some edge to it—so that the servants winced at the sound— “everybody out of here who doesn’t need to be. _Now!”_

The Prince turned again as the room started slowly to clear, then headed back toward the couch and toward the God, who appeared to have noticed none of this. But around at the edges of things the shadows continue to deepen.

“I’m not sure I understand,” said the Queen. “The Investigator said that there was nothing more to do…” She had one of those voices that was both high-pitched and sultry, the kind the Prince thought would be very pleasant to hear whispering something to you in the dark. But now it had acquired a touch of nervousness around the edges.

“The Investigator’s staff have indeed done everything of which they were capable.” The scorn in the God’s voice was delicate. _But so’s a scalpel blade,_ the Prince thought, wincing, as he went to the couch. Approaching, he nodded respect to the King and Queen and knelt by Bellerophon’s couch, simply looking at the man for a moment. He was in his mid- to late twenties, tall, brawny, powerfully muscular: though not a bulky man, definitely big. _If Pegasus has been carrying him around all day, no wonder the horse doesn’t have a whole lot of trouble carrying double,_ the Prince thought. He felt the man’s limbs, found them unbroken. _After a fall from that height..._ It was astonishing. Then, turning his head a little into the firelight, he peeled back first one eyelid, then the other. The pupils contracted, but only a bit. _Not good, but not the worst._ At least the amount that they contracted matched up. _He might just awaken eventually, if he survives past dawn._

“If there’s more business to be done, then let’s finish it, as you say,” said King Proetus. “There’s likely enough to be mourning in this house by dawn, and time to prepare in private would be welcome.”

The Prince put a hand on Bellerophon’s forehead. Even so close to the fire it felt strangely cold. As he knelt there, he noticed too that the light in the room was changing subtly. Glancing up and around, the Prince saw that the shadows that had been gathering at the edges of the room were thicker, darker than they had been. He thought back to the shadows that had gathered around him as dusk drew near in the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees… but those shadows had been benign and warm. These were nothing like to those. A chill hovered behind and within these shadows against which even the brilliance and heat of the central hearthfire had no power. He shivered.

“Preparation in privacy,” said the God, “there’s certainly been enough of that. Time now for the hidden story to come out into the open.”

The King’s eyes, dark, weary, bloodshot, hunted for the God’s in his shadows. “What hidden story? Tell it, and leave us to our grief.”

“Just as you wish,” the God said, in a voice that was calm but as chill as the Prince’s shiver. “So hear it.”

And his voice dropped down deep and slow. “In a far-off land,” he said, “there was once a King with two beautiful daughters. The hand of the eldest was sought by royal suitors from far and wide, and finally her father married her to a mighty young king of the Peloponnese. She went to join her husband in their new home, and they were happy together and ruled wisely and well from their great palace. ”

He turned, walked away a few steps, came back; and this gentle pacing went on. “To that great house came in the fullness of time a young man of royal blood, a handsome hero who had committed the crime of manslaughter, killing his brother. He walked five hundred stadia in penance to start with, and then another five hundred to the Palace, and there begged the King to purify him of his crime. The King meted out such penances as the Gods have ordained for such crimes, and the young man performed them all, and expiated his sin. And the Queen watched the young man who’d come so humbly, in pain, crushed with grief. She saw him find his strength again through the rites of purification, and rise from his own ashes into new power. And as she watched him recover himself, something terrible happened. She fell in love with him.”

The Queen sat statue-still. The Prince, with his hand still on Bellerophon’s forehead, studied his face absently. Dark hair, a strong nose. _Unquestionably a handsome one..._ In his younger day he’d by no means have refused an evening or two with such a man, powerful, even beautiful, especially had his heart been anything to match his face. _And the temptation for an older woman who suddenly finds such under her eye every day, maybe a little bored with her marriage…_

“She tried to hide her love, for she knew it was shameful,” the God said. “She bore her passion and her longing in silence for as long as she could. But finally she could bear it no longer. Late one night she stole out of her rooms and went to the young hero’s chambers. He let her in, confused, thinking nothing but that his noble hostess had some trouble with which she felt he could help her. And she did. She confessed her love to him and begged him to take pity on her—begged him to return her love.

“And then the young hero did something truly terrible, to her way of thinking—something utterly unthinkable, something absolutely unforgiveable. _He refused her.”_

And out of his darkness the God slowly produced in one hand the torn tunic, in the other the torn sleeve, and showed them to the two by the couch. The Queen’s blood began to drain from her face; from where the Prince knelt, not even her position with her back to the fire was enough to conceal it. And off to the side, looking first shocked, then horrified, and finally outraged, the Prince saw Archyngeïs and Andreidês stare at what the God held and realize what the things were and where they’d been found…or missed.

“At first she didn’t take it seriously,” the God said. “Who in his right mind refuses a beautiful woman who loves him, a woman who’s also a great Queen, resourceful, powerful, even dangerous? But the young hero didn’t care. He was horrified. He pushed her away and told her to leave immediately and he’d never mention her moment of weakness to anyone. When she refused, and seized on him to try to take him in her arms, or beguile him to do so with her, the young hero was revolted. Her falsity to her husband, and the breach of hospitality inherent in what she was proposing, so disgusted him that he tore himself physically out of her grip, and tore the tunic too. He told her that as soon as he could decently do so he’d leave a house where such things went on: leave it and never return. Then the Queen fled with the torn sleeve still in her hands, and in time she hid it away, and tried to plan what to do next. For she knew that when her passion was revealed—”

The King was standing up slowly from his chair, eyes dark, face dark, like a thunderhead building. “God or not, shadowed one, how dare you, how _dare_ you speak so before the very face of my Queen—!”

“Your Majesty,” said the God softly, “I’d be sparing of your words, if I were you. You’ve already greatly failed in that regard, and as a result the evidence against you is _far_ more damaging than it is against your lady. Though, interestingly, not by your doing.”

The King stood frozen. The God tossed the sleeve off to one side, the tunic off to the other. Then he clapped his hands together and his gaze went from the King to the Queen again. “Well, now that the fairy tale part is over—any happy ending having become impossible—let’s change the mood. Horror stories work so much better in present tense, wouldn’t you say? Do sit down, your Majesty, there’s no point in standing for this, even though it won’t take long.”

Slowly the King sat again.

“Your wife’s at least partly what you’ve made her,” the God said. “The Queen of a great realm, used to having her whims gratified, her wishes and commands instantly obeyed. And suddenly the one thing she desires more than anything else is the one thing she can’t have. From you she’s learned the art of rage, and when rage isn’t enough, revenge. The two were roiling in her within seconds of Bellerophon throwing her out of his room. She was plotting how she’d punish Bellerophon’s refusal before she’d even made it back to your chambers. Within minutes she’s burst into your bedchamber with her clothes and hair all convincingly disarrayed, and she shows you the sleeve that she’s torn from Bellerophon’s tunic, and she tells you that he’s attacked her, tried to take her by force, and she’s only just managed to escape. And you _believe_ her… or at least you do right _then_. To quiet her down, to keep the scandal from running through the household before you can work out how to control it, you promise her you’ll avenge her. But by morning you’re already having second thoughts.”

The God drew quietly closer to the King’s chair, stood looming over him as the shadows grew deeper in the hall. “There were two problems, weren’t there? For one thing, her rages had been getting worse in recent years; more irrational, more sudden. And they weren’t always founded in anything that had really happened. She’d get the idea that some servant was plotting against her or some courtier was spreading lies about her, and it would turn out not to be true at all. You’d managed to hush up or smooth over some of those earlier problems. But this… _this_ was going to be serious. This young man was famous, a hero. Worse still, he’s a man of integrity and strong moral principle, one who walked long weary stadia to do your bidding and start the process of purging himself of guilt, one who’d performed every task demanded of him, whose remorse and repentance were palpable and genuine. You just couldn’t believe, in the cold light of dawn, that he’d ever try to rape your wife!

“And now she’s put you in a _terrible_ position. If Bellerophon _had_ done such a thing, revenge would be absolutely your right. _But he’s your guest_. He’s not only eaten your bread and drunk your wine and been accepted formally into your house as a suppliant, but you’ve become bound to him as well by the holy rites enacted by the one who purifies a killer on the Gods’ behalf. Even if your wife _was_ telling you the truth, if you _do_ attempt to avenge her assault on Bellerophon, the Furies will be after you within hours. So you don’t dare raise a hand against him. Yet even though you don’t really believe her claim, you also don’t dare _act_ as if you don’t, because then there’s the possibility that she’ll go public with it. She wants her vengeance and she intends to have it at any cost.”

The God turned his back on the King and took a few steps away, gazing into the shadows. As if in response it seemed to the Prince that the darkness toward the walls was flowing slightly nearer, slightly forward, and he was suddenly irrationally glad to be so close to the fire. He slipped his hand unobtrusively down to Bellerophon’s wrist to take his pulse, but also—quite irrationally—to have it closer to his swordhilt. For it began to seem to the Prince that there might actually be things _moving_ in those shadows…

Slowly the God turned, stepped back toward the fire. “So, great King, you ponder this dilemma as long as you dare to—the Queen’s rage building all the while—and at last you come up with a plan. Since you can’t kill Bellerophon, and indeed you don’t want to, you think to yourself, _Fine, let’s just get him out of here and tell the Queen that I’m going to get someone else to do the job._ And you write a letter to your father-in-law King Iobates in Lycia, and lay it all out for him. You tell him about your crazy wife—whose rages and moods poor Iobates has known all too well since her girlhood; about this good young man who’s had a bad start but is trying to turn his life around; about the awful situation that’s erupted here. _Let’s finesse this,_ you say in the letter to Iobates. _Give the young man asylum for the time being. I’m going to tell Anteia that I’ve sent him off to you so you can arrange for him to have some kind of ‘accident.’ Meanwhile just make him comfortable, give him some things to do. Enjoy being a tourist attraction for a little while_ — _that’s an inevitable side effect of the wonderful flying horse. Things’ll quiet down eventually, and when they do the two of us can consult together then and work out what to do.”_ The God took a few steps away, then turned again. “ …That was clever, actually,” he said, almost approving; “a nice solution to a thorny problem. And then you seal up the letter and tell Bellerophon you’ve got an errand for him to run, a message that needs to be delivered to Lycia. And the young hero takes off with your letter the next morning, and you heave a great big sigh of relief.”

The God smiled, and the Prince could feel every shadow rustle with it…and shivered again: this smile was not a pleasant one. “You were a little premature, though, as it turns out. Because you never knew that your letters had been _tampered_ with, did you?”

The Queen’s mouth fell open.

“You never knew,” the God said to the King, “that the night before Bellerophon left, Queen Anteia bribed your secretary to let her see the letters you’d written to your father-in-law. And just imagine her state of mind as she reads what you’ve _really_ written to her father about her, as opposed to what you said you were going to write. Imagine her reaction to discovering that you didn’t plan to avenge her after all. Well, she’d soon sort _that_ out. She wasn’t some hedge-princess from the back of beyond. She was Lycian, and an educated woman: she knew how to read, and more, she knew how to _write_.”

Once again the God dipped his hands into his shadow and once again came out with objects out of nowhere: just a magic trick, the Prince thought, the kind of thing that traveling conjuror who passed through his city did years ago when he stayed as a guest at the Palace. It was compelling, this episodic production of something from nothing. But more compelling by far were the expressions of slowly growing horror on the King’s and Queen’s faces.

“Here,” the God said, holding up the two little clay tablets in their wooden frames, “are your original letters, King Proetus. Their seal, _your_ seal, is broken but absolutely unmistakable. Here—” and in the other hand he held up a couple of scraps of rough parchment— “are the papers on which your wife practiced what words and letters she needed to use to change the text of the messages and still have everything fit onto the tablets: to change phrases like ‘entertain this young hero’ into ‘kill this wicked young man’. She only had so much space to work in, and only a limited time to make the changes so that the amendment wouldn’t be detectable. Then afterwards she sealed the copies up again with your own seal and wax, and no one ever suspected. Especially not poor Bellerophon, who was too honest ever to read a sealed message he was carrying for someone else.”

The God stood between the King and Queen, and smiled under his shadows. _Can they even_ feel _that?_ the Prince thought, the hair going up on the back of his neck again. _Why are they not halfway to Boeotia by now?_

 _“_ So now peace falls in the great Palace of Tiryns, and everyone’s happy,” the God said. “The King is happy because the Queen is off his case. The Queen is happy because she knows she’s going to have vengeance on Bellerophon even though her treacherous husband doesn’t know it. The King’s secretary is happy because… well, that’s a story for another time, but he’s bought himself a lovely new country house, Gulfshore property too, so you do the maths. And Bellerophon turns up at the Court of the King of Lycia carrying his own death warrant, and doesn’t even know it!”

And the God looked up in his darkness toward where the smoke from the fire rose into the wider dark before dawn. “But now Father Zeus takes a hand in his function as protector of suppliants… or maybe it’s just Tyche. Because this being Lycia, famous for that lavish old-fashioned Asia Minor lifestyle, and Bellerophon being a famous hero and an ornament to any court he might choose to drop in on, King Iobates welcomes his sudden guest with a series of feasts and parties and other shindigs that go on for nine whole days without stopping. At that point, when the King reckons that he’s satisfied the requirements of formal hospitality, he asks whether there was anything in particular that brought Bellerophon out all that way. And Bellerophon says, ‘Yes, your Majesty, now that you mention it, here’s a letter from your son-in-law King Proetus.’ And Iobates reads the letter, and what do you think he finds? ‘Dear Iobates, food very good here, weather wonderful, hope things are going well with you, BTW the bearer of this letter tried to rape your daughter, please kill him at your earliest convenience, KTHXBYE!”

The King stared at his wife as if she had just grown snakes for hair. The Queen stared at the God as one might at the Pythia if she were running down the street shouting out your most intimate secrets. “Yes, indeed,” said the God, warming to his subject, “Iobates has a problem now and _no_ mistake! And it’s exactly the same one that Proetus had: young Bellerophon’s a guest and can’t be touched. Iobates, though, not being entirely sure whether to believe this attempted rape story either—because he knows his daughter entirely too well—thinks to himself, ‘All right, _I_ can’t do anything to him directly, but let’s see if the Gods will take a hand.’

“So he starts sending Bellerophon out on the most dangerous quests he can think of, and the young gentleman, being nothing loth, gets on his high horse and gets _busy_. He kills the Chimaera, he almost single-handedly wins a war against the Solymi and another one with the Amazons, he does three or four other jobs of which Herakles himself would not be ashamed. Every single time he comes home with hardly a scratch on him. And King Iobates, not being a stupid man as Kings go, though around here you do have to wonder, Iobates sits down one evening and writes a letter back to King Proetus. And it says something along the lines of, ‘Sorry, must have been a clerical error of some kind, that letter you sent me, because the Gods obviously love this boy and no way am I killing him!’ He sends Bellerophon on home by air to Argos, with the letter, and with some nice goodbye gifts following him by surface carrier. And then the young hero turns up here to the acclamation of absolutely everybody. Well, _nearly_ everybody. Oh, and with one other piece of news: King Iobates is so impressed with Bellerophon that he’s going to give him half his kingdom and the hand of the Princess Philonoë in marriage.”

And the God looked down at Queen Anteia from amidst his shadows. “Your _sister,”_ he said, very soft.

The Queen, white as an unpainted statue, sat trembling, her face set, her lips in a thin tight line.

“Well, that,” the God said to the Queen, straightening and sweeping away again, “ _that_ had to have been just a bit too much to bear. Let’s just take it moment by moment, shall we? Not only does Bellerophon turn up in that big beautiful expensive new front courtyard as a conquering hero instead of as a dismembered corpse, despite what you wrote to your father—but he also comes bearing the news that Daddy darling has decided to let him marry your little sister. And that—” he turned and paused— “ _that’s_ where you truly came undone. Because you couldn’t _bear_ the idea that little Philonoë, who never did or suffered anything significant in her life, that sweet little Philli was all of a sudden going to effortlessly and legally be given the one thing you wanted more than anything in the world and for all your wealth and power _couldn’t have._ How _dare_ she be the fairy tale! How _dare_ she turn your life into the horror story!”

Once more the God started moving softly toward the Queen. “ _…_ Well, you’d soon see about _that_.You would craft a much more effective revenge that would settle this mess once and for all. Because after all, if you want anything done right, you’ve got to do it yourself. _”_

The God’s voice was thick with scorn as he drew nearer again, the shadows thickening around him; and even through them his eyes glittered with disdain. “Love… such a powerful influence in the lives of mortals, theoretically; so beneficial, it’s claimed, so much the best part of being human. But in practice, in reality, mostly such a _vicious_ motivator. And what we see in you is what love’s usually _really_ worth among mortals. You decided that if you couldn’t have him, no one would at all…not when what _you_ were planning paid off. He was better dead and unjustly condemned to the House of Hades, to an afterlife he didn’t deserve, than living in happiness with someone who wasn’t _you!”_

The silence in the throne room was like something from the time before Chaos brought forth Night.

Then the God turned on the King. “You were furious too,” he said, “on realizing what she’d done. And what she was probably now planning. But it was too late to expose the Queen now and let her take the fall, too late to put her away; questions would be asked and everything would start coming out. So you just turned a blind eye to what she was planning and let her get on with it, because, well, anything for a quiet life!”

The God swung back to the Queen again. “So now it gets ugly—”

Now _it does??_ thought the Prince.

“—Once again you make use of the Gods-given gifts of reading and writing and find out from someone, I’ve got four possibilities as to whom but that can wait, about this and how it can be used.” And from the darkness his gloved hand produced the body of the akontion and cast it down at the Queen’s feet. “Getting the right kind of vervain’s no problem—” —and the bruised bunch of it landed beside the dead akontion. “As female head of household you’re in charge of the apothecary side of things for the royal House, and no one thinks twice when you say you need some marsh vervain for a healing infusion. You stake out the cage stuffed full of vervain in the right conditions, which would be the dark of the Moon about eight days ago now, and because the documentation was clear you manage to catch an akontion within a couple of days. You keep the vile little beast shut up in its little cage with the herb until it’s habituated it to the scent, and while you’re at it you make sure that right in there with it is the sleeve from the tunic of the man you were so desperately in love with, the man who wouldn’t have you and must die for that crime before being rewarded with your little sister.”

The God turned away and gazed into his shadows for a moment. “And then one fine morning, _this_ very fine morning as it happens, Bellerophon goes out riding. He’s got no idea that the Queen’s just wandered over into the stable, where Pegasus is standing ready after the grooms have put his riding kit on him, and quietly slipped a big bunch of marsh vervain into his saddlebag—” And he turned again, and the saddlebag landed in front of the Queen’s feet. “Then, as he flies away, she goes back up to her rooms, shuts the door, pulls out the little cage she’s been keeping hidden away for the last week, puts it on the windowsill and lets the little winged surprise out into the morning air.”

The God came to stand quite close to the Queen now, bent down over her, and she actually started crowding back into her chair, away from the shadows that were gathering around him. “After that,” the God said, “it’s just a matter of time. Pegasus is fast, but the akontion’s carrying a lot less weight and is nearly as fast itself. Not much more than two miles from the house, it catches up with him. It tries to get into the bag, but the wind from Pegasus’s wingbeats makes that nearly impossible. The akontion gets infuriated. It tries to bite Bellerophon, who smells like half of what it’s been acclimatized to seek out, but it can’t get at him, again because of those wings. Instead the turbulence from the wingbeats drives it into the horse’s flank, where it bites for all it’s worth. Pegasus goes wild with the pain and throws his rider, then plunges off half out of his mind with it. Like many immortal creatures, he’s able to feel where there’s a concentration of a great many other immortals, on Mount Olympus, not far away. He heads there in some kind of desperate animal attempt to get help, for himself or his rider or both. Shortly thereafter he fetches up on the mountain, and the stable’s grooms take him in, and his presence there alerts the Gods to the fact that something has happened to Bellerophon.”

The God whirled away from her then. “And by the time the Investigator gets here with his team to find out what’s going on, the story’s been in place for several days and is spreading all the time. Days ago you and King Proetus quietly started telling your household staff what only the two of you would have been privy to: the disturbing story that Bellerophon’s been thinking of flying to Olympus, that there were troubling signs and portents about this in Lycia, and that’s why he left—in fact, any rumor you can think of to suggest that this young man’s been too successful too soon, has in fact fallen prey to hubris in the genuine Greek style, and the Gods have been preparing to take him down a peg. The news spreads secretly, but like wildfire: servant to servant, household to household. Within a day or three everyone in Tiryns and beyond is saying it, so it must be true, mustn’t it?”

And the God looked over, not at the King, not at the Queen, but at the Prince. “And when so many people believe such things about a man lying at Death’s door… even the Furies and the Fates may be fooled. _But not tonight.”_

Kneeling there quietly with his hand still on Bellerophon’s pulse, the Prince realized he needed to close his mouth, because it had simply been hanging open. He’d watched this whole chain of reasoning being assembled in front of him in bits and pieces over the course of the evening, but hadn’t had the wit to know it for what it was. But now all the links were in place, and the chain had fastened itself to itself, becoming a thing without a beginning or ending, steel-hard and inescapable. And the would-be murderer, or murderers, were chained to the deed by it—chained as solidly as Andromeda had been chained to the rock, waiting for her doom to come. _And he started to see all this the moment he saw the snakebite on Pegasus's side. Earlier, possibly._

The Prince met, through the shadows, the gaze of the pale eyes he could just barely see. “That,” the Prince said under his breath, too softly for any but one specific other to hear, “was amazing.”

But there was still some struggling going on within the compass of the chain. Not from the King, though: from the Queen. Anteia straightened up in her chair and for the first time looked like a Queen again instead of a scared and miserable woman. “It’s a pretty tale, young God,” she said, and produced enough scorn to be a near match to his earlier. “It’s a shame that no one who’s here believes you.”

Her eyes were on Andreidês and Archyngeïs, who from across the room were looking at the God with undisguised anger… though not _precisely_ , the Prince thought, with disbelief.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say _that_ ,” said a slightly gravelly voice from the shadows by the door.

The Prince’s head snapped around. The shadows surrounding the far doorway drew aside as if willingly giving space to the figure now walking in. That shape had the same kind of tremor of light about it that Mrs. Hudson had had, and that Andreidês and Archyngeïs had in lesser sort: but this light-tremor was far more noticeable, more obvious, even in the firelight as he came close. Indeed somehow more light seemed to cling about the man strolling in than wanted to adhere to anyone else. It hung in the folds of his dark _pteryges_ -kilt and his own loose pale blue overtunic, it glinted on his woven golden belt and the sickle-shaped bronze blade hanging from it; it caught in his dark-and-silver hair and in his malt-brown eyes.

But the godlight didn’t say nearly as much as that face did. It wore a unique expression of thoughtful experience, city-smarts and (barely submerged) guile. And then the Prince realized what lay casually over the newcomer’s shoulder. At first glance he’d taken it for some sort of cane or swagger stick, but it was actually a herald’s staff… _the_ Herald’s staff, two cubits long and golden. Faintly, for they weren’t fully manifesting at the moment, he could just see the shadows of the snakes wrapped around it.

_Hermes!_

“Heard the whole thing,” said the gravelly voice, sounding strangely cheerful: “didn’t miss a word. I’ll need to hear it all again later today in the office, Consultant.”

“Investigator,” said the Consulting God, turning to greet him, “it’ll be my pleasure.”

Hermes came to a stand in front of the couch and looked down at Bellerophon: and then at the Prince, who had just finished standing up, with some difficulty, when he realized who he was looking at. “He’s with me, Argeiphontês,” said the God.

The Prince couldn’t think what to do except stand as straight as he could and nod respectfully to the Messenger of the Gods, as he would have to a very senior commander in the field. “Sir,” he said.

“Stand easy,” said the Investigator, and then looked down at the King and Queen: simply looked at them. The Prince felt something cold go down his back, something far more severe than the mere spooky-shivers-for-effect that the God’s tame shadows had been provoking. “So,” he said to the Consulting God, “I’d call that a result.”

“Not yet, Investigator,” said the Consulting God. “One more job to be done tonight, while it still _is_ night. Get onto the Fates. Have them put the Shears aside for the time being. Bellerophon may wake.” He looked at the Prince. “Tell him.”

Hermes gave the Consulting God a look. “We’ve already had the local healer in—”

“What, you mean the one supplied by _these_ people?” The God tilted his head back and seemed to be looking down at the rigid and terrified King and Queen from an even greater height than usual. “Well, that’s _his_ testimony discounted, whatever it might have been. And if it was one of your staff, Argeiphontês, well, we’ve already seen what _they’re_ worth tonight.”

Hermes threw a later-for- _you_ glance over at Archyngeïs and Andreidês, then looked with annoyance at the God, though without contradicting him. The God looked at the Prince. “Physician?”

It was very odd to be addressed by this title rather than the more usual one, but it left a strange glow of pleasure behind it. “It’s true; he might awaken yet,” the Prince said. “It’s always a roll of the dice when head injuries are concerned, but sometimes all the brain needs is time to calm after the initial shock is past. Might be weeks, might be just days. But surely he deserves the chance.” He glanced down at the man on the couch. “Seems a shame for him to be punished for having done the right thing.”

“Which is just the way I’d put it to the Fates,” said the Consulting God to Hermes, “and to Themis. If news about this gets out.. _when_ news of it gets out… if Bellerophon gets sent to the Shades when his behavior was in fact unimpeachable, the message most mortals will take away from the news will be the wrong one—the _last_ one the Gods should be sending.”

Hermes frowned. “At the very least,” the Consulting God said, “his final destination needs to be reviewed. But if Justice was truly going to be served, he should be given a chance to resume his life if his body will let him.”

The Gods’ Messenger sucked in a long breath. “Can’t make the appeal from my level,” he said after a moment. “It’ll have to go through the Thunderer’s office. And even so, the Fates may not listen.” Then he put up his eyebrows. “Still: has to be tried.”

And he vanished.

The Prince looked over at the God with much less surprise at this than would have been normal for him, but then the general abnormality of this day was catching up to him. “No shoes?” he said.

“Shoes?” the God said, sounding perplexed. “He had shoes on.”

“No, I mean the winged ones,” said the Prince. “Doesn’t he need—”

“What? Oh. Prince, those are symbolic. The Messenger goes wherever he needs to, quick as thought, all by himself. If the shoes do it too, they caught it from _him_.”

“Oh.”

Hermes reappeared, not a hair out of place. “Done,” he said. “Cronion’s office is on it. …Surprised you bothered taking this one on at all, though, Consultant. Thought cases with mortals in them were so very tedious.”

“Well, I needed something to amuse me today…”

Hermes threw a casual glance at the Prince. The Prince couldn’t think of anything to do but shrug.

The Messenger raised his eyebrows at him. “…But you and I need to have another little talk tomorrow, sunshine,” the Messenger said then, looking back at the Consulting God. The God merely gazed back as if this was nothing particularly new or interesting. “Crawling all over my scene when it was sealed? To say nothing of horse theft—”

“Oh, come on, Investigator, be reasonable, you can’t steal an _immortal_ —!”

“Don't you start with me now, Consultant. You _don’t_ go running off on your own, I thought we had this out last time…!”

The God sighed and then inclined his body toward Hermes Argeiphontês in what might, just _might_ have been construed as a bow of very _very_ slight apology in excellent light and if one had a measuring rod handy to judge the angle. “I’ll submit myself for admonition tomorrow,” the God said. But the amused glint of eyes that the Prince was able to catch suggested that the God wasn’t particularly worried.

Hermes’s eyes matched it, though in much more restrained style: mortals were watching. _Well,_ other _mortals,_ the Prince actually caught himself thinking. “Fine, off you go then, you’ve embarrassed my team enough for one night.”

“Not possible, Argeiphontês,” said the God lazily, and with what sounded to the Prince like slightly malicious enjoyment. “Text me when you want me. I’ll be at your disposal.” And he whirled and headed away from the hearth, the evidence, and the immobile royalty of Tiryns, the dark cloak swirling about him. “Prince?”

The Prince nodded respectfully to Hermes again and went after his own God.

It took only a few seconds to catch up with him. “Extraordinary…” the Prince said under his breath, and grinned."Simply extraordinary."

The Consulting God’s voice smiled. “Hungry?” he said.

“Starving. But let's go get the horse off the roof first."

The God undid the Shadowcloak, whirled it about them, and darkness fell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	15. Of A Very Late Dinner and Another Fireside Chat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The healer-Prince has questions (again), the Consulting God has answers (partial), and the fortune cookies are at best equivocal.
> 
> Warnings for horsefeathers, dim sum, challenges in utensil management, the tying up of some previous-chapter loose ends, and the ’08 vintage (which was really rather good). Also, bees. (Ssh, they’re sleeping.)

When they came out on the rooftop the Prince glanced toward the shore and was astonished to see that morning twilight was already beginning to creep into the heavens: the eastern horizon was showing a clear dividing line between sky and sea that had nothing to do with the dull, cold-steel shimmer cast over the Argolic Gulf by the setting moon. The last of the day’s residual warmth was gone, and mist was beginning to creep and flow over the forested hills to the south of the city, somehow making everything look even more chill.

Or almost everything. Standing almost as he’d been left, but now with his left wing spread downward and outward toward them, Pegasus was idly putting his feathers in order, presently nibbling at the soft short downy ones that covered the wing’s shoulder. As they appeared, his head came up and he looked calmly at them, shifting a forefoot: not a stamp of impatience, just a casual gesture that said “Ready when you are.”

“This horse is simply worth a kingdom,” the Prince said, going over to him and patting his neck. “Just look how good you’ve been!” Pegasus dipped his head to the Prince’s shoulder and lipped it again, leaving a stray bit of blue-white down there. The Prince picked it off, then pulled another one off the horse’s lip, laughing. “That’d be a new grooming problem to have to handle…”

Behind him the Prince could just feel the God rolling his eyes. “Prince, you _do_ realize that we needn’t ride him back, don’t you? I can manage from here.”

“I thought you might,” the Prince said, “but I wasn’t thinking along those lines anyway. He’s had a long night too.” He idly tucked the feathers into his belt pouch, wanting to look at them more closely later; then tapped the horse on the wing-shoulder. Pegasus cocked it up and out of the way, still spread, and the Prince walked under it to have a look at the snakebite site, running one hand over the lump. “It’s smaller,” he said. “That’s good. Should be gone by tomorrow at this rate.”

He went back to Pegasus’s head end and undid the golden reins from the beam they’d been wrapped around; then glanced down toward the palace’s stables. “I don’t know if I like to leave him here,” the Prince said. “Not sure he’ll get the care he needs while his master’s not well…”

“Send him back to Olympus, then,” the God said. “He plainly knows the way, and the stable staff will take care of him.”

The Prince chuckled. “Pretty good care, from the looks of it. His sleeping quarters were more palatial than some places I’ve slept…” He pulled the reins up over Pegasus’s head and looped them once carefully under the top of the breastband, making sure there was plenty of slack in them before tucking their loose end away under the riding pad. Then he took hold of the bridle’s cheekpiece and looked into Pegasus’s near eye. “You go back to the Mountain now, all right? They’ll give you some water and something to eat. I bet you’re not the only one who’s starving.”

The horse tossed his head, stamped again gently. “I think you can take that for a yes,” the God said.

The Prince nodded, glanced back at him. “Would it be possible for you to send one of your text things ahead? Let them know he’s coming, and to watch out for him?”

Another eyeroll, and then a sigh; but the God’s response had an indulgent undercurrent. “If the Investigator ever finds out I’ve been sending texts for _horses_ , I’ll never hear the end of it…” Nonetheless he spoke a brief message that the Prince watched spell itself out across the air in brief bright letters before completing itself and vanishing. “There. Satisfied?”

“Yes, thank you,” the Prince said, and patted Pegasus’s neck one last time before backing away. “Go on, you, don’t keep them waiting…!”

Pegasus spread both wings and worked them once or twice at full extent, then crouched back on his hindquarters a little and sprang into the air. The downward rush of wind from those wings was amazing: the Prince had to brace himself against it as Pegasus took off, working for altitude and then banking around northward as he gained height and speed. His shape grew brighter, not dimmer, as it shrank smaller against the northern sky, for he was ascending into regions where Dawn’s rosy fingers were already stretched out far enough to stroke him. Pegasus became a brief carmine-colored star before he faded up into the landward high cloud and vanished a few breaths later.

The Prince shook his head and turned to the God again, and couldn’t stop the grin of pure unbelieving delight that split his face: didn’t even want to. “How am I even here…?” he said, softly and in wonder, and gazed around them at the slowly wakening world, then back to the God again, who for the moment was still as a statue carved in shadow against the morning twilight. “How is it all this is happening to _me?”_

“Let’s get back to the house,” the God said, “and we can start filling in some of the details for you.” He stepped over to the Prince, swung the cloak off once more and whirled it about them both. A breath of darkness, a touch of warmth—

And they were standing at the foot of the white stone walk again, between the two fluted pillars. Towering above them, mostly still drowned in twilight, Olympus and its palaces reared against the slowly brightening sky, with here and there the tiny spark of a distant lamp twinkling in some deep window or hanging from between the pillars of some shadowy portico. On the very topmost dome a faint gleam of burning rose overlaid the gold, a herald of the oncoming dawn.

“Nice view,” said the Prince.

The God slipped his cloak from around them and laid it loosely over his shoulders, for a moment looking up at that light along with the Prince. “Hadn’t really noticed,” he said as they started making their way up the walk together.

The Prince chuckled. “It’d take me a while to take something like that for granted.”

“A long while, I hope,” said the God. After another fifteen paces or so he paused, and the Prince paused with him. The God was looking over at the strange square beehive, his head cocked a little sideways, listening. Only the faintest hum came from inside, the soft sound of many pairs of small wings starting their daily job of keeping cool air moving through the hive. “Too early for a debrief,” the God said. “I’ll talk to them later.”

The Prince nodded, approving. Mortal beekeepers did that too: the bees must always be told what was going on in your life. But he much doubted that this God did anything the usual way. “You don’t just text them?”

“Prince,” the God said, sounding amused, if dryly so. “Much as it pains me to say it, some things are better done the old-fashioned way.”

In front of them, the door with ΣΚΛβ written on it in gold swung inward with no visible hand laid to it. “Thalastrae?” the Prince said: but no answer came back.

“No, they’re upstairs unpacking the Ch’inese,” said the God. “The House doesn’t need their help for the doors. It knows its master.” And the next moment the God was heading up those stairs two at a time.

The Prince went after him nearly as quickly as he caught the scent of food, though it wasn’t like any food he’d ever smelled before. He didn’t care: his mouth was already watering and his stomach was making noises he didn’t want his host to hear for fear he’d be upset that his guest’s needs had been neglected so long.

As it turned out the Prince realized he needn’t have worried, because the God probably hadn’t heard his stomach over the general ruckus. As soon as they came through the sitting room door they were in the midst of a flurry of mostly-invisible activity: plates flying about on the way to being set on the kitchen table, peculiar soft parchment-like containers being opened and spilled out into bowls, water being poured into flasks—flasks that had chipped ice in them even in this weather. “You have an ice house under here as _well_ as your magic hot water source?” the Prince said, very impressed. “No question, this _is_ Heaven…”

“No such thing, Prince, the ice comes from the colder of those two cabinets—”

“Oh,” said the Prince, “the one below the decapitated gent.”

“Ah, you’ve met!” the God said. “Excellent.” He had just hung up his cloak behind the door, and the Prince saw the red eye in the Shadowcloak’s lapel glance around it and then drift closed with an expression of satisfied weariness. Now the God was also slipping off something that the Prince hadn’t spotted before—a long strip of not-quite-fabric, hazy as mist in evening air, that had been looped about his throat. It was a deep slate-blue, vaguely patterned and soft-looking as a strip out of the underbelly of a summer thundercloud. The God undid the loop, tossed it over the hook that held the cloak and headed into the kitchen, circling the table. “Any substitutions tonight, Thal?”

“There wasn’t any char siu—”

“—you’ve got the chicken dumplings instead—”

“—Pot stickers, chao mai—”

“—fried noodles, steamed buns, phoenix claws, lotus rice—”

“That should hold us. Where are the sticks? Get a set for the Prince as well. You opened him that _amphoriska_ of ’08 earlier? Some of that for both of us, it’ll have had time to breathe properly now. Come, Prince, sit. This is a late supper as the Ch’in eat it, the people who live out where the Sun rises, past the Hesperides. Their Gods have an embassy here and there’s exactly one decent Ch’inese restaurant on the Mountain, better than nothing, I suppose. They stay open late, not _this_ late unfortunately, but at least the stuff reheats well. Oh, come on, Thalastrae, _where’s the soy sauce—?!”_

If the evening had been nearly unintelligible in mortal terms since they’d left the House, it now proved to be no less so on their return, as for a while the God just didn’t seem able to settle. He got up and sat down and got up again and went after things as if he didn’t have six or eight or ten sets of invisible hands waiting on him. It took some minutes, but after a little while the Prince realized: _He’s_ fussing _over me. He’s trying to make a good impression._ It was charming.

It was also interesting in that the Prince was now better able to see the God as he moved around his own place, quick and deft and with an energetic grace like a sword-dancer’s, even though there was no seeing _him_ any more clearly. Though the slender shape of him was more visible with the cloak hung up, the God's own personal shadows still clung close about him and made it impossible to see his face. And when he did finally settle down, it was almost exactly like dining with a shadow as deep and dark as one that might be cast against the wall by bright light. But this one had depth to it, a man’s form inside it, though masked and softened around the edges, its inner details darkened down past seeing except for the occasional quick bright glint of pale eyes. The effect was most strange, but the Prince had been dealing with it all evening in dimness and dark, and the new strangeness was probably mostly about the change in lighting.

Once again the Prince watched fascinated as the dinner service began and things seemed to float about: first the basins the invisible women brought them so they could wash up before dinner and the ewers that poured warm scented water over their hands, then the linen towels to dry with. After that came a small long-necked clay amphora that floated itself over from a stand on one of the counters and poured out for them into two more of those flower-fragile, clear-as-air drinking glasses. The Prince and the God pledged each other in the new-poured wine, as across-the-board diners might do at any more commonplace table, and fell to. And it was strange, then, to find how bizarrely comfortable this all seemed, how completely matter-of-fact.

Though there were some logistical problems to deal with first: most specifically, the strange utensils the God had insisted that the Thalastrae give him. “…And you’re really meant to eat with these things? Why? Is it a way to keep from washing your hands before you eat? Why wouldn’t you do that anyway?”

“Try the fried noodles, Prince, and then tell me you’d rather eat them with your fingers.”

“Well, a bit messy, certainly, but that’s just part of dinner, isn’t it? And what’s a ‘fried’?”

“…Oh! Of course, that hasn’t been invented here yet. It’s not a thing: it’s a cooking technique. Submerging food in boiling fat.”

“Interesting. Certainly these taste very good done that way…”

“If you use the sticks you’ll get even more of them in there. Well, theoretically. Try them like this. No, that’s— The other way— Thalastrae, _show_ him—!”

“Ah, my God, see, there’s a problem with that. I can see the sticks but I _can’t_ see her hands, so I have no idea how she’s holding them!”

“Oh, Prince, come on, now, _work_ with me here—”

“Certainly, delighted to. Let me just see what your hand’s doing there— no, the other side, don’t forget I use the other hand—”

“Nearly there. Choke up on them a little.”

“Like this?” The Prince used the eating sticks to pick up a little brown crispy half-moon shaped thing from one of the bowls, popped it into his mouth. It had some kind of finely chopped meat in it, very savory.

“Exactly. I said you were a quick study—”

“Or like this?” And the Prince reached over with the sticks and filched one of the little round steamed buns that was presently sitting on the God’s plate and awaiting his attention.

The God glared at him in very mock indignation. “I’ve created a monster. Prince, I’ll thank you to keep your hands off my dumplings.”

The Prince stopped with the eating sticks about halfway to his mouth, looked at the little pale wrinkled thing he was holding between them, and made a soft, rather choked noise. The God looked at him as if perhaps concerned that something had gone down the wrong way. The Prince looked at the little round bun, and then at the God. The God looked at the Prince. “What?”

The Prince carefully and gently put the little wrinkled dumpling down on his plate, and then started to laugh, and found he couldn’t stop. The God looked at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, while the Prince could do little but reach out and pick another one up from the serving bowl, and put it pointedly by the first, and then keep laughing until the tears leaked out while he pointed helplessly with the sticks at the two things on his plate. “Dumplings. ‘Your dumplings...’”

After a moment the God rolled his eyes, amused. “The inevitable discovery of the intersection between the humor of sex and the humor of food. Prince, your birth’s unquestionably noble but your mind’s in the gutter; leave those be until you reacquire some self-control. Here, have a phoenix claw.”

Still laughing, the Prince reached over with the sticks for one. “Look at all of these. How many phoenixes do you _have_ around here?”

“Not _that_ many. These are chicken feet. Fried again.”

“That’s really a tasty thing to do to food. I could get used to that…”

“Beware, Prince. Civilizations have fallen because of too much frying.”

“Really? Where?”

“Well, in the Farthest West, not yet of course, but soon, in a couple of thousand years—”

And they ate and they drank and they talked and occasionally they laughed, and the Prince kept finding it odd, yet in an inexplicably happy way, that the conversation—peculiar though it was—still flowed as easily as it might have as at any informal dinner back in his own home, where friends steal choice tidbits out from under each other’s noses from the common dishes as they discuss the day’s business. _Yet it’s not like we’ve just met today,_ the Prince thought. He thought of the Lady Xanthe and her endless, seemingly artless questions, and realized with a private smile that the mind concealed inside her had found out more about him in that two-hour walk back to the Palace than some people would ever know about him though they’d been acquainted with him for years. And after that first meeting, of course, had come two hours of dinner during which the finding-out hadn’t been entirely one-sided. It was just a matter, now, of working out how much of what the Prince had found out that evening was true: or more accurately, still true _here_.

The conversation came around again eventually to that evening’s events in the great palace in Tiryns, for every now and then the Thalastrae would put in a shy-sounding question between changing out old plates for new ones, and the God didn’t seem shy about letting them know how brilliant he’d been. “So now,” the Prince said, “I suppose the King and Queen can expect a little visit from the Furies.”

The God snorted, reaching past the Prince for another fried thing, a little roll with vegetables inside it. “Oh, please. Nothing’s going to happen to them as regards a little attempted infidelity. After Troy? The Gods couldn’t be arsed.” The God scowled inside his shadows as he popped the morsel into his mouth and chewed, and the Prince could feel it. “The sin against hospitality will be held as worse at the sentencing stage. But when that will be, I have no idea. In fact, very likely nothing at all will be done about them in the short term.”

“You mean after all we went through, after proving Bellerophon’s innocence and their guilt—”

“Yes. Infuriating, isn’t it? The Gods are far too fond of the status quo… theirs or mortals’… and the last thing they want to do is politically destabilize the region. Displace the King and Queen, and you know what happens…”

“Someone moves into the empty space,” the Prince said.

“Exactly. So why would the Gods allow another war to start over a single act of attempted murder? And a crime of passion, at that? They're still licking their wounds over the aftermath of the last one.” The God shook his head. “Queen Anteia will doubtless stay right where she is, married to her clueless pushover husband, and the court of Tiryns will busy itself with damage control. Not that it’ll help much.” His voice dropped to a growl as he picked among the rapidly decreasing selection of fried things, picked up one of the last two phoenix claws and examined it. “The daughters are already half as mad as their mother, who’s been steadily driving them that way, despite her attempts to blame Dionysus for having cursed them for some imaginary slight. So typical of mortals to blame the Gods for what they’ve done to themselves, or each other.” He ate the phoenix claw while the Prince sipped a bit more of that extraordinary wine: and finally the God sighed. “But now at least one man will wind up in the part of the Underworld where he truly belongs, should he die.”

“A good night’s work, then,” the Prince said.

The God shrugged. “Trivial.” But the Prince could feel a trace of smile inside those shadows. “More wine?”

The Prince held out his glass. “My thanks.” _Won’t hurt to have a little extra help sleeping tonight_ , he thought. Then his eyes went to the front windows, where morning’s earliest light was showing through the curtains. _Today. Whatever; I’m still so keyed up..._

“I suspect you’ll sleep well enough regardless,” the God said as he finished pouring for the Prince and then attended to his own glass.

“It amazes me how you do that,” said the Prince.

Again he could feel the smile through the God’s shadows even though he couldn’t see it. “Your thought shows in your face…there’s no need to delve deeper. Your eyes rest on the wineglass, then move to the windows’ light; your face relaxes looking at the one, tenses at the sight of the other. I could deduce significant portions of your night from your stance, your clothes, your hair, the way you smell, even if I hadn’t been there with you.”

The Prince game him an amused look. “The smell. You could tell that I’d been on a _flying_ horse by just the _smell?”_

"Well, his scent _would_ be unique. However..." The God leaned forward across the table and reached out past the Prince’s face. For a moment his fingers were warm in the Prince’s hair behind his ear. Surprised, the Prince held quite still, feeling that touch most intensely. But then the God drew his hand back and showed him a single downy blue-white feather as long as the joint of his thumb… then let it fall onto the Prince’s plate.

The Prince laughed softly. “As I said... extraordinary.”

“Not at all.”

“You’re too modest.”

“I’m really not,” the God said, amused. “And while I’m thinking of it—something you said earlier…”

 _Uh oh._ “What?”

“’A good thing that you’re on the small side and I’m so lean,’ was the wording.”

“Yes. And?”

“What do you mean ‘lean?’ I have it on good authority that I’m simply lithe and lightly muscled.”

“Bought yourself some poets, have you?” the Prince said, and grinned. “I guess a new God might have to while he's getting himself established. Well, plainly some people will say anything for money. I have news for you, my God. If you’re _not_ lean, then you really need to stop wearing black, because it's very much reinforcing the impression.”

A slow, slight smile inside that darkness. “You really aren’t afraid of _anything_ , are you.”

“What? Some things,” the Prince said, “of course. …Just not _you_.”

“Good,” the God said after a bit, “that’s… good.” And then his eye fell, rather hurriedly the Prince thought, to one of the few things on the table they hadn’t yet managed to eat: some little brown folded-looking things on a plate. The God picked the plate up, handed it to him. “Fortune cookie?”

The Prince reached for one. “What are they?”

“Sweets with wise sayings in them. Theoretically.” He tilted his head at the one in the Prince’s hand. “That one will say something about a change in your fortunes, I think.”

The Prince cracked the little thing open and removed the little strip of fine paper inside. “‘A golden egg of opportunity falls into your lap this month.’” He smiled. “Well, see that, you were right. And yours?”

The God leaned back in his seat, stretched a bit. “Something high-flown and moralistic with no application to my situation whatsoever,” he said, and cracked his cookie open.

And then he blinked. “Well?” the Prince said.

“‘Teamwork: the fuel that allows common people to achieve uncommon results.’”

“Mmm,” the Prince said, feeling far too wearily cheerful and comfortable at the moment to say anything so crass as _Wrong!_ “Sounds like you got one of mine by mistake.”

The God let the fortune flutter out of his fingers, stood up and stretched again. “Let’s finish by the fire,” he said, and as he glanced out toward the sitting room the drapes of the front windows drew themselves closed against the strengthening morning light.

They brought their own glasses with them, as the Thalastrae seemed to have considered themselves dismissed as the meal finished. The God stretched himself out in the chair at the right-hand side of the fire, and the Prince sat in the one on the left, and for a few moments each of them simply tilted his head back and relaxed, looking at nothing in particular. Around them, the shadows started to fold in again, and the Prince thought how different these were from the darkness  that had started crowding in around the round hearth in the palace in Tiryns. These shadows were friendly to the fire in the little hearth. _And to me. How very strange that is._ And he looked over into the fire to his left, with the dark fragrance of the wine rising up from between his hands, and shook his head in happy disbelief. _Yet in some ways, not strange at all..._

“I’ve already deduced this,” said the God, “but would you answer a question for me?”

“Testing your accuracy?” said the Prince, amused. “Ask.”

“Back at your Palace,” said the God, “after I deduced your Lord Chrysaos at dinner that night…” The Prince snickered into his wine. The God rolled his eyes. “What use did you make of that information once you had it?”

“Asked my father to find an excuse to buy the donkey. We’ll find him a quiet job where he doesn’t have to worry about being molested in his off hours.” He looked up at the God again. “…Was that what you deduced?”

The God nodded. The Prince smiled, mostly to himself. “Very good,” he said, and looked down into what remained of his wine, briefly warmed. That request, and the story that went with it, was one of the very few things that had been able to make his father smile on the terrible last night they spent together in the shadow of Mount Aroania. “May I ask one now? … And then I’ll go to my couch, because frankly the day’s beginning to catch up with me.”

“Ask what you will, Prince.”

“My leg hasn’t troubled me all this night,” said the Prince. “That move when I took the spear away from that guard? By rights I should have fallen over then.”

“Yet you didn’t.” The God’s satisfaction was plain to hear.

“Was that your doing?”

“No. Not directly.” And he felt the God smile. “You have your own power, Prince. Don’t discount it. I gave you, perhaps, something you’ve been missing; what came after was your doing. …But as for getting some sleep, that’ll be wise. The Investigator will want to see us after we’ve all had some rest.”

_“Us?”_

“Prince,” said the God, “are you in any doubt of your role in what we did tonight? Don’t be.” And the Prince could feel his approval stirring in the shadows around them as if they were long leaves rustling in a warm wind. “The Investigator will want to get a feel for you, ask you what you did and why. But if he decides he likes you, you can depend on his friendship… which will be most useful for you. If Argeiphontês is willing to vouch for you, that’s a great stroke in your favor. Cronion himself listens when the King’s Herald speaks.”

“All right,” the Prince said.

The God nodded, finishing his wine, then turning the glass in the firelight. “Before you go to your couch,” he said. “I have one last thing to ask you.”

“Ask,” the Prince said. Wariness stirred faintly in him, as if in his sleep, but no more.

“Do you want to stay?”

The Prince was astounded, for the God sounded almost uncertain. “What? Do I—” He laughed. _“Yes!”_

All around them, the inward-leaning shadows seemed to shiver with joy.

“All right,” said the God. “But now I need you to make me a promise about something. Just this one thing. Otherwise… something most unfortunate could occur.”

The Prince swallowed, as he’d somehow been expecting something like this. What he’d thought in the light of yesterday’s dawn—that he’d fallen into legend—was no less true now than it had been then. “Tell me.”

“You must never try to see me in the light,” said the God: “never try to see my face.”

The Prince let out a breath. “I was going to ask you about that,” he said. “Why not? What’s this all about?” He waved his hand at the shadows, and at the God himself. “Or… forgive me if I’ve asked a forbidden question—”

The God nodded as if the question was expected. “Not at all. Prince, your status here hasn’t quite been… regularized yet. Oh, it will be, shortly. But there are gods who have reason to be sensitive about the presence of mortals on Olympus. It’s best that as few of them as possible know you’re here; and some of them have very subtle ways of knowing. The darkness you see about me doesn’t just protect me from being easily seen. It protects you as well, especially when we’re out and about. What other Gods can’t clearly see, they can’t reasonably bring accusations about later. And what you haven’t seen, other Gods can’t see in your mind. Chances are good it’ll never come to that. But still… we have to take precautions. Plausible deniability…”

“I see,” the Prince said.

The God let out a breath.

“…But there’s more, isn’t there?”

Even through that darkness, he could see the God’s eyes glinting at him. “You truly are shrewder than usual for a mortal.”

“We do hold court-justice once a month in the Palace, you know,” the Prince said, “and I’ve been presiding for a while now since my Father’s health got worse. You learn pretty quickly how to tell when someone _knows_ where the stolen cabbages are hidden, but because you haven’t phrased the question just right, they don’t feel they have to admit it.”

He could feel the slight dry smile echoing itself in the shadows around them. The God bowed his head for a moment as if seeking words. “You _are_ just a mortal, Prince,” he said at last. “And this _is_ the realm of the Gods. There are many dangers that can’t touch you on Olympus. Yet it’s also not exactly safe.” He looked up again. “There are things about this place, about me, that would simply be dangerous for you to see. If we’re going to share a house, you need to be protected from those. …Have you heard of Semele?”

The Prince thought for a moment. “One of Zeus’s mortal lovers, wasn’t she? She made him swear to give her whatever she asked for. He agreed…”

“Swore it by the Styx, too,” said the God, sounding amused and scornful. “You’d think the King of the Gods would know better to swear any mortal what he himself had made to be an unbreakable oath. Especially when they both had _lurrrve_ on their minds.”

The Prince drank the next-to-last swallow of his wine. “And then she asked him to show himself to her in his full glory as Lord of the Thunderbolt…”

“Took the cleaners _days_ to get her silhouette out of the stonework,” the God said. “I think you’ll agree that it’s better to avoid any similar problem… and this shadowing is the simplest way. As regards protecting you from deities who don’t need to know about your presence, while you’re within these walls or outside on the House’s grounds, the House itself will protect you. While you’re within its shadow, you can’t be perceived by anyone who shouldn’t know you’re here.”

The Prince nodded. “All right.” He had that last swallow of wine, put the fragile glass aside. “So. Why _am_ I here?”

A pause. “I promise I’ll tell you as soon as I can,” said the God. “But you need to spend a little time on site before you’ll be ready to hear that story. Will you trust me?”

He looked into what he could see of those pale eyes through the shadow drawn about them. There were things about that half-seen expression that somehow disturbed him, some ways made him sad, some ways excited him. Granted, it was very soon to be making such determinations just on sight. But the Prince had more than mere vision to rely on. Where he couldn’t see, he’d long since learned to let his heart advise him—and it saw nothing to fear, nothing at all. “Yes,” he said.

“And as for that one thing I’ve asked of you—”

“I promise,” said the Prince, and rose, and held out his hand. The God stood too, and they clasped forearms on it, as warriors do. The Prince did his best to ignore the strange shiver, as if of anticipation, that went through him at the God’s touch. It was harder, however, to ignore the God’s; and the Prince broke his grip and his gaze as soon as he decently might.

He looked around him, then, in a last moment of not believing that he'd finally found his way here; for here he was. He  turned back to the God before he went upstairs. “Rest well, my God,” he said. “And thank you.”

“Thank _you_ , Prince,” the God said, and turned away. “Sleep well.”

The Prince went quietly upstairs to the room that was his, where the curtains were drawn for him and his armor all neatly racked up; where soft pillows and warm throws were laid out for him on a couch that was luxuriously wide, with a little oil lamp set burning on a table beside it. Right now, though, what really interested him about that couch was that it was horizontal. The Prince slipped out of his clothes and into a night-tunic that had been laid out for him, one made of linen as fine and delicate as the one that had had the sleeve torn from it.

He lay down on the couch and blew out the lamp, and felt sleep drawing itself around him soft as a cloak of shadow almost before he’d finished stretching himself against the couch’s comfortable embrace and the gentle give of the pillow. And if no dreams later came to him, perhaps that was because even in the depths of sleep the Prince knew that the darkness of earlier dreams was now wrapped around him in reality, and just one flight below him, in its little hearth, the fire burned warm and would still be there when he awoke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	16. Of Two Godly Visits and an Afternoon Oath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Investigator gets cranky. The kettle gets a workout. The Healer-Prince starts settling in… and the Consulting God gets something he really doesn’t want.
> 
> Warnings for addiction issues (fruit-preserve section), Fate(s) stepping in, localized embarrassment, salicylic acid, musical interludes, and sudden departures. Also, snakes (non-flying this time).

Warm sunlight outside his eyelids woke the Prince before he even opened his eyes. It was almost as bright as if he lay on a beach somewhere. But no beach ever felt as comfortable as what he was lying on now, no matter how many pads a campaigning soldier might manage to stuff under himself while lying down by the wine-dark sea. _No surf,_ he thought, _no wind. Just warmth…_

He stretched just slightly, and the movement instantly reminded him of the soft throw over him, the pillow under his head, the velvety couch he lay upon, and a long long day spent getting there. In his mind rose unlikely or impossible images of midnight chambers being searched by manlike shadows, firelight flickering on the painted pillars of a throne room, stable-straw like thin-shaved silver underfoot, the moonlit indigo world spilled out under him like a strange new sort of sea. _Either someone slipped some of those little yellow-spotted mushrooms into my last meal in the tents,_ the Prince thought, _or my life has become…_

He opened his eyes. _Something very different._

Warm sunlight glowed bright in the room through half-translucent window coverings that muted the blaze of late morning— _maybe even early afternoon?—_ to a bloom of white-golden radiance that abolished nearly every shadow. His armour hung gleaming on a rack very like his own back at home, the bright bronze throwing soft reflections up against the dark golden walls and ivory ceiling. His clothes lay tidy over the bench at the couch’s foot. And downstairs, waiting for him, were the fire and the shadow, the voices and the invisible hands.

He got up quickly, glanced around. On a carved three-legged table in the corner past the left side of the window sat an ewer of herb-scented water, still faintly warm when he touched it, a basin, and a linen cloth and sponge. Quickly he washed up, just enough for him to be tolerable until he should have time to visit that amazing bath room downstairs again, and then went to the wardrobe where his clothes brought from home had been stored. The Prince pulled out another of his heavy cream tunics, slipped into it, and then opened the strange door to go down and see what the day had in store for him.

No sooner was he through that door than he heard a strange, strange sound coming from down the stairs in the sitting room—so odd that the Prince just stood still where he was for a few breaths to listen to it. It was like some animal’s cry, like a sorrowful voice. But though the voice was musical, and was singing something dark and odd in the Dorian mode, it had no words. The sound of it was alternately sweetly moaning and then sharp and precise, and somehow it made the Prince’s breath catch to hear it; as if he might suddenly understand what it was saying, if he listened long enough.

The sound stopped, then after a moment started again—the same wordless music, but this time reaching higher, into a range more like birdsong. _It’s an instrument,_ the Prince realized after a moment, and breathed properly again, heading down the stairs. It wasn’t that he actually feared anything he might meet in this house, but the new and peculiar things kept catching him off balance. _It’s like being in a war zone. A beautiful, strange war zone. In_ Heaven.

As he came to the bottom of the stair he paused where he was for a second, feeling the wind of one of the Thalastrae go by him before he heard her voice. “Good afternoon, Prince!”

“Truly, afternoon already?”

“Just past midday,” said another of them from the back hallway.

“I must really have needed that sleep,” said the Prince, and went into the sitting room, where it was hard to see the fire burning in the hearth for the brilliance of the sun coming in the windows. By the window stood the Consulting God, dressed in a sort of very soft long overtunic, dark-blue and with a muted shimmer, possibly of silk; under it was a short white tunic over a pair of long soft grey trews that came down to his bare feet. His shadows still lapped his head and body close and sometimes flared out about his overgown as he moved, but the look of these too was casual this morning, and his profile could sometimes be glimpsed through them, silhouetted against the windows' light.

The God turned toward the Prince as he came in. In his hands he held something dark, a cubit-long graceful shape in carved wood; or rather, he held it in one hand, braced under his chin. The instrument had a long neck like a pandura, but very thin, and its body was much longer and broader in relation to the neck than a pandura’s would have been. Strings ran down its neck, maybe six of them, and were fastened over a sort of bridge to the bottom of the instrument’s body. In his other hand, instead of any kind of plectrum, the God was holding what looked like a bow with a very shallow curve, thickly strung with what might have been strands of linen.

“Was that you making that music?” the Prince said to the God. “It was lovely.”

The God shrugged. “The playing helps me think,” he said, and laid the instrument aside on the back of his chair, while stifling a yawn. “Housemates should know the worst about each other, so I should warn you… I do it at night sometimes.”

“If it sounds like that, I won’t be troubled,” said the Prince. “Nothing from the Investigator yet?”

“No,” said the God. “Most likely he’s been delayed by some other business; it wouldn’t be unusual.”

“There’s time to eat something then?”

“I expect so.”

“There’s bread on the counter,” said one of the Thalastrae behind him, “and cold meat.”

“Thank you.” But it wasn’t so much eating as drinking on the Prince’s mind as he went into the kitchen. “I came up with something yesterday,” he said in the God’s direction. “Maybe you’ll like it. I certainly want some; it seems like just the thing for when you wake up…”

The God came wandering in to watch the Prince fill the kettle and dig out the pot in which he’d made the tea the afternoon before. Then he went rooting in the cupboard for the tea, but everything seemed to have got shifted around again. _Well, not everything,_ the Prince thought, as he came across and brought out the jar of toes. “What are these about?” he said to the God. “And the gent in the cupboard that’s cold—what’s he here for?”

“I experiment,” said the God. “When someone’s killed, the men or gods around may lie about the timings and causes, but the bodies don’t. These…” He took the jar from the Prince. “These are how I learn the truths the dead can tell.”

“Quicker than going down to the Shades and asking them personally, I suppose,” said the Prince.

“Not to mention much safer. Even for deities, it’s not smart to walk that road too often. Even demigods have got themselves stuck down there when they got careless…” He yawned again.

“Did you sleep at all?” the Prince said, reaching way back into the cupboard and finally finding the little rough bag that held the tea.

“No,” said the God. “I don’t sleep much, Prince.”

“Well, you might try getting a bit more,” said the Prince, shaking tea into the pot. The kettle came up to the boil, the underlit water roiling as if with blue fire, and he watched it again with complete delight, then poured the boiling water in over the leaves and put the lid on the pot. “It really couldn’t hurt after a night like that.” As he turned to lean against the table and look out into the sunlit room, both the big muscles of his inner thighs twinged abruptly, and he grinned a little at the pain. “How are your legs feeling?”

The God snorted and turned away as the Prince went rooting for cups to drink the tea. “Like those of someone who’s never before needed to spend hours of his valuable time clinging onto a sweaty quadruped.”

 _Not that it was the quadruped you were clinging to, so much._ “And never before had such a long way to fall off one if he didn’t get the hang of it in a hurry,” the Prince said, shaking his head, grinning again. “No matter. Think I can do something about that.”

The God wandered back into the sitting room and picked up his instrument again; the Prince went off down the hallway to use the plumbing. Then he went upstairs to dig around briefly in his medical kit, and came back some minutes later to pour out the tea. Once again as that dark aroma floated up to him it brought with it an ineluctable sense of being part of something that ought to be happening—had in fact started happening a long time before, and had been patiently waiting for him. It was so _very_ odd. But the Prince also thought then in passing of how very much the _same_ life at home had started becoming when he came home for the last time from war, every day like every other with only the most minor differences of routine. _And this is better, even though I have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s_ endlessly _better, the Gods be thanked. Or one of them, anyway…_

He went looking for a third mug, added a little more water to the kettle and boiled it again. From the little cloth bag he’d brought down from his kit the Prince shook out some brown scraps of bark into his hand, judging the amount by eye, and dumped them in the mug. Then he was startled nearly out of his tunic when he realized the God had slipped up behind him again, utterly silently, and was poking at the third mug with his instrument’s bow. “What’s that?”

“Willow bark,” said the Prince. “Should take the edge off the aches. Give it a few minutes to steep.” Then he handed the God the mug of tea. “But first, try that.”

The God tucked his bow under the arm that was holding his instrument, took the mug. “What is it?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” the Prince said, rummaging around again on the counter for the honey and put a dollop in each of their mugs, stirred each. “Found it up there behind the toes and things.”

“No idea,” said the God, sipping at the tea. “Maybe Thalastrae got it at the Tesko.”

“Sorry, the what?”

“It’s the market where we get our food,” said one of the Thalastrae as a broom floated past the Prince, heading back toward the God’s room.

“Wouldn’t mind seeing that some morning,” the Prince said. “Is it very big?”

All the Thalastrae began to laugh together, a very amused chorus. “You have _no idea.”_ “Just _wait_ till you see!” “Are _you_ in for an experience!”

He raised his eyebrows, drinking his own tea and watching the God to see what he made of it. “Are they overstating the case?”

“Wouldn’t know,” the God said, wandering back off into the sitting room. “Never been there. That’s their job.” He went to stand in front of the windows, gazing out as he drank.

There was some muted snickering from the invisible women behind him that the Prince decided to inquire about later. “How is it?”

“Mmm? Oh.” The God put it down, waved the bow in a dismissive way. “Not sweet enough. Needs something.” But the Prince noticed that the God then immediately picked up the mug and had another drink, and another after that.

For his own part, the Prince was already noticing that there was something in the tea that was making him feel brighter, even after so little of it drunk and so short a time. _I’m on to something here,_ he thought, and went out into the sitting room with the steeped willow bark infusion, holding it out to the shadowy form by the window. “Here, my God,” he said, “drink half of this.”

The God gave the second cup a look, a sniff out of his shadows. “Disgusting.”

“Tastes bad, too. But your legs will thank you.”

The God snorted, took the offering, drank, pushed the cup back at the Prince. The Prince took it, muttered “Yassou”, knocked the rest of the liquid back, and made a face: it was even worse than he remembered.

He brought the cup back into the kitchen to clean the bark out of it while the God once more started drawing those sweet but mournful sounds from his strange bowed instrument. Pocket breads and more slices of that cold beef were laid out; he stuffed some of these into a ripped-open pocket and went in to sit down on the couch. But as he went, a tiny movement caught his eye by the door. It was the God’s cloak, and the motion had had nothing to do with his passing. _Did it just breathe?_

He went over to look more closely at it in the light. “Tell me about this?” he said. The blackness of it was a wonder, and not just a matter of dye; somehow he knew darkness itself, shadow itself, was woven into what hung here so docilely from a hook. He ran a hand down the cloak and hardly felt a thing. It was like what running one’s hand down a cloud must feel like. “Where did it come from?”

The God glanced over. “My Godmother,” he said. “Persephoneia.”

The Prince’s mouth dropped open. “She’s your—”

“She and the Lord of the Dead are my godparents,” he said.

“So the shadows…” the Prince said. “I see.”

“I doubt it.” The God put down his bowed lyre again. “The cloak—”

“Wait!” the Prince said. “I remember.” For a second in memory he was once more sitting on the steps of the Temple of the Gods with Miki, while the sun angled down past the city walls and the two of them savored the last minutes of warmth before the walls’ shadow fell over them. “The poets say that Death has a helm and cloak of invisibility.”

“That comes of the same fabric as Death’s cloak,” the God said. “Wool from the dark flocks that graze the hills around the House of Hades.” He came over to the door, but he brought his tea with him and just stood there for a moment, reaching out to run a hand down the fabric himself. “Such wool has many strange properties just as it stands. But when woven by an immortal, it gains more yet… and my Godmother wove it with her own hands. She has an ebony loom, she told me when I was little: strung with night. It sits in one of the porches of the great House, and she sits there and weaves and sings songs she remembers from when she was young, when she was Spring…”

He turned away with a half-seen expression that would have been neutral on anyone else, but the Prince could clearly hear the shadow of affection in his voice, incompletely concealed. “When I came of age my Godfather brought me the Cloak and taught me how to use it. For a little while he and I walked the world together. An interesting time…”

The Prince shook his head. “So amazing,” he said under his breath, looking at the cloak. It hung there calm and quiet, a shadow that no light could pierce, the red eye at the collar tight shut against the sunlight pouring in. But the Prince couldn’t quite get rid of the sense that the Shadowcloak actually was breathing, little shallow sleeping breaths too small to see.

He turned away and made his way over to the chair on the left side of the fire, putting his snack down on the table beside it. “You know,” he said, looking up at the dark shape silhouetted against the sunny window, “I don’t really know anything about you.”

From their own shadow, those eyes glanced sideways at him. “Do you not?”

It was hard to know what to make of the expression in the half-seen gaze or the timbre of the voice. “Well, you said it yourself: you’re new. Other gods have had plenty of time for their stories to get out into the world. Who their parents are, what they do. What their feats have been, their adventures. Their losses, their loves. Do they have special attributes, things they like, things they don’t like…”

“Tedious,” said the God, sounding a bit absent as he turned away. “I’ve little time for such things, Prince. It’s the Work that matters.”

“But this matters too,” said the Prince. And when the God looked back at him, almost challengingly, he said, “It _does_. What you do is fantastic! And someone should… I don’t know… someone ought to get the word out.”

“Ah, well,” said the God, and this time there was mockery in the voice, “surely that’s the job of all the poets I’ve bought.”

The Prince felt embarrassed now at his last-night’s gibe. “Well, if you _have_ bought any, maybe you need better ones. I mean, stories a lot less important keep getting told.” The Prince turned away too, wondering why this was suddenly so much an issue for him. “Last night, you saved a man’s _soul_. How much more worth hearing is that story than some legend about a lamebrain minor goddess shagging some passing mortal and then sneezing and accidentally turning him into a daffodil?”

The God let out a quick bark of laughter: or rather, the Prince realized, it escaped him against his will. “A point,” the God said after a moment. “But not one best suited to my gifts, Prince. I’ll leave it with you, if you care to pursue it. Though do let me know if you work out how to remedy so shattering an inequity.” He turned away and began to make the instrument sing again.

The Prince listened for a bit, amused that wordless music could somehow also sound so sarcastic, and munched on his bread and beef while sipping at the tea. It wasn’t bad, but he then found himself thinking, _Something sweet would really be better with this…_ The thought of the honeyed preserves that his farmers’ wives back home used to load him down with now flitted across his mind. “This Tesko of yours,” he said over his shoulder in the direction of the kitchen, feeling sure one or another of the Thalastrae would be there, “would they have fruit preserves, do you think?”

“Seems very likely,” said one of the voices. “Some of us are going down this evening, when it’s quieter over there; you can come down with us if you like.”

“Might just do that,” the Prince said, and finished up the last of his snack. He sat back, then, and drank his tea, and watched the God swaying gently in front of the window and drawing sweetly mocking laughter out of his instrument. But then the laughter stopped, and the God looked down out of the window and said, “Looks as if someone’s interested in you, my Prince.”

And the Prince heard the door open, and some rather loud and annoyed buzzing. “Oh, do come in, are you all right, whatever are they on about?” said Mrs. Hudson’s voice from downstairs over the door opening. And then another voice, darker, gravellier, said, “Doesn’t matter, they get up on the wrong side, sometimes… or on _his_ wrong side, how would I know—?”

The Prince looked down at himself and his very casual “morning” dress in sudden shock. The Consulting God waved an unconcerned hand at him. “If he’s come here, the meeting’s informal,” said the God. “We’re fine just as we are. Relax. —Ah, Investigator,” the God said, looking over his shoulder as Hermes came in.

He was dressed more or less as he had been the night before, with the addition of a long open charcoal-linen _khiton_ over the kilt and undertunic. The famous staff was once more laid casually over his shoulder, and as he stood up to greet the guest, the Prince was able to get a better look at it in the clear early-afternoon light. The snakes were much more visible, both of them gazing around them until all four of their unnerving little golden eyes locked onto the Prince’s, examining him. Their expressions, insofar as the Prince had any gift for reading snake-faces, were merely mildly curious: but their regard was strangely piercing, as if they were taking note of information about him that he himself wouldn’t have known how to describe.

“Prince,” Hermes said, nodding at him, and sat himself down on the couch, as if this was someplace he’d been often, while putting the staff down on the low table in front of the couch. “How was your night? First one here, I think.”

“That’s right, sir,” the Prince said. “A good night, very restful. Kind of you to inquire.”

The God’s manner was casual, but the Prince could feel the weight of his gaze as if it was a physical thing. The feel wasn’t an oppressive one, but it took a little getting used to. The snakes had now settled down and gone back to curling and writhing idly about the staff. “’S all right, Prince,” Hermes said. “If you and the Consultant are going to be associated, an epithet’ll do.”

The Prince waited for the God to offer the incoming guest some concrete hospitality, and it didn’t happen. “Are you going to just let him sit there?” he said to the God, incredulous, for this kind of slack treatment of a guest wasn’t on no matter how commonplace his visits might be. When the God simply looked up from doing something to his instrument’s tuning pegs and tossed his head in a sort of “what’s-the-rush” gesture, the Prince turned back to Hermes and said, “Wine, Argeiphontês? Or there’s some reaper’s draught in the cold cabinet.”

“Actually, the Prince has found a new start-of-day drink,” said the God, finally putting down his instrument and stretching. “Care for some?”

“Wouldn’t say no,” said Hermes, looking at the Prince curiously. “What is it?”

“I think it’s called tea,” the Prince said. “We’re still working out how to drink it.” He went into the kitchen, found another mug, and brought tea in for the Messenger.

Hermes drank, looked thoughtful. “Reminds me of something. You feel how it makes your tongue squeak against your teeth a little? Like oak, or tanbark…”

The Prince nodded, knowing better than to be surprised at the sudden botanical observation. This was after all the god who had passed the wily Odysseus the secret of the herb called moly, thus keeping him from being turned into a pig at an inopportune moment.

“Milk,” said the Consulting God suddenly, having another drink of his own. “Milk might work.”

“In this?” said Hermes, shooting the God a strange look. “Well, suit yourself.”

“I always do.”

“Which is exactly what we need to talk about,” said Hermes, “because sometimes that approach doesn’t work.” And now the snakes reared up from their wound-around-the-staff position, and that thoughtful regard of theirs was aimed squarely at the Consulting God. “Last night—yes, you got the job done, no argument. But now we have to have the procedural discussion again.”

“Dull,” the God said, and turned away toward the windows once more.

“Yes you must be,” said Hermes, putting his feet up on the table—while the snakes shuffled themselves and the staff a little to one side to give him room—“otherwise you’d have soaked up the basics by now! Not exactly up to overusing your gigantic brain when it comes to procedure, are you.”

“You know my strengths have to do with pushing the outside of the envelope,” said the Consulting God, “not lounging about in the middle in company with the substandard brains that unfortunately surround you on all sides.”

“Oi!” said Hermes. “Don’t get cute with me, sunshine. Yes, Archyngeïs and Andreidês bollocksed it up right enough, and I’ll be dealing with that at my end. But _you_ did it three times as many ways. Broke the evidence chain that many times at least. That sleeve, for one thing. How’m I supposed to know where you got that from?”

“I told you where when I texted you this morning. And the Prince was with me, and saw me find it.”

The Investigator looked at the Prince. “Did you?”

“Yes.”

“Right, so you did,” said Hermes. And the Prince realized instantly that Hermes had just been inside his head and had seen what he saw: effortlessly, tracelessly, without the slightest hint to the subject of the investigation that that was what had happened. _The man’s in a coma and his heart can’t be read,_ the God had said last night. _So simply a God can do it, then_ —

“That’s right, Prince,” said Hermes. “But the problem’s this: he could just as well have _made_ you think you saw that.”

That was an alarming concept. “Could you?” said the Prince, looking over at the God. And immediately the question was out of his mouth, he felt foolish, because of course he knew the answer. He remembered clearly enough what the God had said he’d done to the guard and the servant who’d crossed their paths.

The God half-turned from the window, but didn’t quite look at him. The darkness gathered about him could have made it hard to tell that this was the case, but the Prince was already getting the trick of knowing when the God’s gaze was on him. It was partly a matter of his stance, and partly that the shadows themselves spoke to him somehow and betrayed where their master’s attention lay. “Yes,” said the God, “of course. But also of course, I wouldn’t.”

“So you say now,” said Hermes. “And now you might even mean it, Consultant. But later?” The Investigator’s already slightly gravelly voice now dropped toward a growl. “You and I both know what you get like when the game’s running. You start playing fast and loose with evidence chains and staff notifications when things get exciting and you have a chance to make my people look bad.”

“It hardly takes a God to do that, Investigator. They’re naturally gifted that way—”

“All right, just shut it!” And to the Prince’s mild astonishment, the God shut. “It’s not them we’re talking about here, it’s you. Every investigation has a weak spot. Damned if I’m going to let it be _you_ just because you love being right so much that it blinds you to getting the job done inside the rules.”

The God’s shadows wrapped themselves more tightly about him, the very emblem of an unseen scowl. “Now maybe you’ve got yourself a colleague? Fine.” Hermes applied none of the mockery to the term that his underling had the night before. “You ask me, that’s all to the good.” He flicked a glance over at the Prince: he inclined his head a little in acknowledgement. “Another pair of eyes? Especially when they’re a healer’s? That’s good too. Someone to watch your back? The way you hare around when you get going, and the situations you run yourself into, better yet. But still.”

The God said nothing. Hermes glanced over at the Prince. “You need to keep an eye out, Prince, that you don’t let him drag you with him into bad habits as well as bad places. We have rules, and if he doesn’t stay inside them, the work he does is worthless.” Hermes turned his attention back to the God. “He’s going to run around to crime scenes with you, fine, but I expect you to educate him on how we do things _proper_. Clear?”

“Quite clear, Investigator,” said the God, sounding actively annoyed.

“And as for the rest of it, so that we know everything’s on the up-and-up, I need an undertaking from you that you won’t interfere with this mortal’s memories while you’re about my business.”

“I’ve told you, I never would—”

“You _know_ what I need. Don’t make me ask twice.”

The God let out a long furious sigh and more or less stomped out into the kitchen. He went rummaging in the cupboard, flinging things about and causing a distressed rustle of mid-air catching-and-replacing among the Thalastrae; then came back with something that he slammed down with what struck the Prince as unnecessary force onto the low table by the couch, and stood there looming over it, and the Investigator, in a dark pillar of bad temper that the Prince could actually feel on his skin like the itch of incipient hives. “Do you want to check it first?” the God said, his voice positively acid.

The object in question was a tall slender glass vial about the length of the Prince’s hand. The glass of the vial was clear, and topped with what looked like a black stone stopper: and it was full of some dark grey liquid. The Prince shivered all over at the sight of it and had no idea why.

Without comment and without any sign that the God’s anger bothered him in the slightest—even somewhat as if he was refusing to notice it—Hermes picked the vial up and looked it over, then put it down again. “So,” he said. “I’m waiting.”

The God reached down and took up the vial in his hand. “I swear by the flood of Styx, by the divine water in whose name are sworn the oaths no God may break, that I will not alter or interfere with the memory or thought or heart of Prince Iaon Dasosarchëidês in the course of our work for and with the office of the Investigator.” And he turned and slammed the vial down on his desk not _quite_ hard enough to break it; but the violence of the gesture surprised the Prince.

“All right then,” said the Investigator, sounding entirely easy, as if such displays of temper were nothing new to him. “That’ll do to be going on with. Now…” He leaned back against the couch, looking a little more relaxed. “I want a description of your involvement with this case from top to bottom, with special attention to what your night was like, so I have everything in place for my own writeup when Upstairs comes pestering me.”

The God sighed another exasperated sigh and started rattling off what he’d done when first called to the scene, dry as a shopping list that you might take to market with you. The Prince, shortly lost in a haze of internal _amazings_ and _how did he_ know _thats_ that there wouldn’t be time to get answers for now, started itching to write all this down so he could inquire about it later. “Uh, listen—”

The God waved off to one side without even looking at him. “Tablets and styli on the desk,” he said, and the Prince went for them while the God kept on describing what he’d seen on first laying eyes on Queen Anteia that no one else had even guessed at: her education, her thorny relationship with her little sister, the signs of fury and frustration and something concealed, and a strange faint scent that she’d been in contact with, something he couldn’t identify—

“Can I get you to please slow down a little?” the Prince said, settling himself and starting to scratch symbols into the wax of the first tablet. He wasn’t a fast writer at best, and found himself embarrassed to be struggling with this issue while actually sitting in front of the God who’d invented the alphabet with the intention that it should be easily used.

“Wouldn’t mind that myself,” said Hermes. “If someone else is complaining about it, at least I know it’s not just me.” And he glanced at the Prince with an amused expression. “Quite the self-starter, this one,” said Hermes then, with a sidelong look at the God. “You in the market for a priest?”

 _What?_ the Prince thought, for there was no job he would have wanted less: he’d seen what that kind of life had done to Miki. “I’m not his priest!” he said. “Let’s just say ‘his scribe’ till we get the details sorted out.”

“Fair enough,” Hermes said. Those dry, wry eyes were resting on the Prince with a look that was almost one of good-natured mockery: but it wasn’t at the Prince’s expense, he could tell. It had more to do with the God. “Let’s go with that. But I need you thinking as a healer too, as you were last night. Consultant, go on, finish up with your part until you left and met up with the Prince here. Let him finish what he’s writing and then we can get on to what he saw when you two locked yourselves in the stable…”

It took a while, with the God constantly correcting the Prince’s notes and filling in detail when the Prince absolutely couldn’t stop himself from asking how the God had deduced something. But soon enough they were talking through what had happened from the time the Prince and the Consulting God had left the House of the Two Hundred Twenty-One Bees. The Prince got up to make tea again and brought them all fresh cups of it, and the descriptions and ensuing cross-examinations by a very alert Investigator never stopped the whole time.

In particular Hermes was interested by the Prince’s evaluation of Pegasus’s snakebite, and the Prince found himself having a little trouble describing just what he’d seen to someone, even a God, who wasn’t also a healer. “There was something about the shape of the swelling,” the Prince said, “and there’s no use looking at it now, because if he’s kept healing as fast as he was last night, the marks’ll be almost gone. They were about…” He glanced down at the table by the couch, and the Herald’s staff, where the serpents, looking bored, had more or less tied themselves in a knot and were staring in opposite directions; one of them was gazing idly at the Prince. “Can I borrow your snake for a moment?”

Hermes burst out laughing: and then so did the Prince, when he thought about how what he’d said must have sounded. “Heard a lot of come-ons in my time, but never one like that,” he said, and pushed the herald’s staff toward the Prince with one foot. “Feel free.”

The Prince came over with the tablet and stylus tucked under his arm, and crouched down by the table. “They’re not likely to bite, are they—”

“Not unless I tell them to. They’ll play nice.”

The Prince put the writing materials to one side on the table and reached out toward the nearer of the two serpents. It looked at him thoughtfully but made no protest as he slipped a hand cautiously under its head and pressed fingers gently onto the spots where its jaws hinged on either side of its face. The jaw dropped open to reveal small neat fangs rather like those of the friendly brown-and-cream-splotched leopard snake that lived under houses and in granaries to hunt the mice and rats. “There we go. See the front ones? The marks were just closer together than these by a nail’s thickness or so. But the swelling was a little more marked posterior to the bite sites, suggesting that the front fangs were back-curved like a viper’s….” He paused to sketch them in the wax of the tablet, the snake and the Investigator both watching him as he did so.

Hermes nodded, and they went on, the Prince continuing to take his notes where he sat on the floor by the table. It was amusing, though, that every now and then the snake nudged against his hand for attention like a cat, and the other one threw it the kind of annoyed look with which one sibling might favor another that it suspected of sucking up to an adult for favors. _My life,_ the Prince thought again, _has become so extremely interesting…_

Soon enough the story had moved on to the Prince’s and the Consulting God’s arrival in Tiryns and their examination of the Queen’s and Bellerophon’s rooms. Once or twice during this process Hermes paused to ask the Prince for confirmation of some detail, and though the Prince knew that the Investigator was once again looking at the moment through his eyes, there was absolutely no way to tell it was happening. _It’s a good thing I trust him,_ the Prince thought; _it’s Hermes after all…_ But it was still unnerving.

And then came the denouement; the scene down in the great hall. While Hermes was taking note of details of the Consulting God’s deductions, more amplified now—and the Prince took note of these—he was also looking for more detail about Bellerophon’s condition. The Prince gave him as much information about this as he could, though the situation was full of imponderables, especially since the patient was a demigod.

“One thing, though,” Hermes said suddenly, holding up his hand as the Consulting God was about to launch once more into the details of the deduction about Queen Anteia. “Before he got going, you spoke up all of a sudden and had Archyngeïs clear the room. Whose idea was that?”

“Uh, mine.”

“Why?”

The Prince licked his lips, unaccountably feeling a little nervous. “Well, what I said at the time. Gossip runs like lightning in a royal house. The things that I thought were about to be said about the King and Queen they might or might not have been true—” The Consulting God turned a briefly withering stare on him out of his darkness; the Prince held himself straight under it. “But they had a right for what was going to come out to be as private as it might be, under the circumstances. To have it running loose as gossip wouldn’t have served anybody. And even someone accused of murder has a right to be treated with respect until it’s proved.”

The Investigator studied him for a moment. “Nice,” said Hermes after a few seconds; but it was the Consulting God he was addressing. “Not something you’d have thought of. And well done.” That was for the Prince again.

“Seemed right at the time,” said the Prince.

“So it was—”

And then a little bell rang, apparently in Hermes’s belt pouch. Argeiphontês groaned. “Oh, _now_ what?” he said. “Thought today might be quiet enough to actually get this paperwork done for a change…”

He reached into his pouch, and suddenly in the air in the middle of the room white letters began spelling themselves out in line after line, though they were too blurred for the Prince to read. _A privacy thing, maybe?_ the Prince thought as the letters kept on writing themselves on nothing.

“Wait, _what_ in Themis’s name—” The Investigator’s brows were knitting together. “Since when does _this_ happen?...”

Even in his shadows, the Prince could see that the Consulting God’s head was up like that of a gazehound scenting the air for prey. “Tell me.”

“It’s a murder.”

“But not a very usual one, from the sound of it,” said the Prince.

“No,” said the Investigator, standing up and reaching down for his staff: the snakes immediately unknotted themselves and promptly wound into the normal caduceus doubletwist. “You’ve certainly come along at an interesting time, Prince. We don’t normally get murders where the Fates _themselves_ notify us that’s what’s happened.”

 _“What?”_ said the Consulting God.

“Mortal by the name of Meleager,” said the Investigator, waving his hand to vanish the text away. “Apparently the Fates issued a conditional death notice on him just after he was born. Happens sometimes,” he said aside to the Prince. “One or another of them dropped a piece of wood into the new baby’s household hearth and said that Meleager’d last as long as it did. Well, twenty-odd years later, now he’s dead all of a sudden. That piece of wood got burnt to ashes last night. Murder, no question. But who did it?”

The Prince looked up at Hermes, rising himself. “That is completely bizarre.”

Hermes nodded. “Yes it is. Another human case—” he said, looking over at the God. “Still. Will you come?”

The God, immobile for the previous few moments, cast a glance at the Prince, then moved in a flurry of darkness, heading back toward his room. “How can I refuse? Besides, as you say, when the Fates _themselves_ dial sampi-kappa-theta— Go on ahead, Argeiphontês, we’ll be right behind you. Where are we headed?”

“Calydon. I’ll have the office text you the details.”

“Thank you.” And though by now he was all the way down the hall and surely in no position to see, “Prince,” the God shouted, “why’re you just standing there? Go get changed. The game is on!”

“Right,” the Prince said, nodded to the departing Hermes, and ran up the stairs.

***

It was sunset before the two of them were once more making their way up the white stone walk toward the House’s black door. The God was striding along in a state of extreme pleasure with himself, and the Prince was shaking his head, half in a new version of the pleasurable what-has-my-life-become state, and half in general embarrassment at being a member of a species that seemed so bent on killing people who should have been near and dear to them.

“Families,” the God said in amused and near-fathomless scorn, shaking his head as he finished draping the Shadowcloak over one arm.

“It’s disturbing,” said the Prince. The God’s deduction that it was Meleager’s own mother Althea who’d thrown into a hastily kindled fire the log with which his life and fate were bound up was unnerving at the very least. Ostensibly the cause had been a desire for revenge against the young man who’d shamed both her brothers during the course of the hunting of the monstrous Calydonian Boar by giving the boar’s skin, the prize of the hunt, to the young huntress Atalanta.

But it turned out that jealousy had been in the air again. It hadn’t just been rage over the lady Althea's beloved and rather codependent brothers being shamed. The God had found evidence enough that the mother was just a bit too fixated on the son whose life she’d held literally in her hands for all these years. And the thought of Meleager’s growing attachment to the tough and beautiful Atalanta—so very unlike his mother, so impossible for her to compete with—was unbearable enough for her that in a few terrible moments of fury, she’d found killing him an acceptable alternative.

“Love gone wrong…” the Prince said, feeling more than a little uncomfortable as they made their way up the walk. “Have to say, we mortals don’t seem to be making a very good showing at the moment.”

The God paused as they came up even with the beehive, and let out a long breath. “Don’t let it bother you, my Prince,” he said. “In their way, they’re behaving no worse than gods might. And at least they’re not being boring.”

A small crowd of bees had started drifting toward them as they approached, and now came to hum and hover around the God’s head for a few moments, one of them landing on his shoulder and more or less vanishing into the personal shadow that cloaked him. “Yes, I know,” the God said, putting down a finger for it to cling to and pulling it up out of the shadow. “Just tell Herself it’s been busy. I’ll come talk to you in the morning.”

The bees headed back off to the hive as the God turned toward the front door again. It opened for the two of them, and they paused just inside, the God hanging up the Shadowcloak on the hook by the door, the Prince hanging up his swordbelt beside it. “What was Argeiphontês asking you about before we left?” the God said.

“Oh. He asked if I’d write this up tonight the same way I was doing with the Bellerophon case. I told him I would.”

The God made a little “hmmf” noise as he went up the stairs. “Surely that kind of scutwork should be left to his own lackeys,” said the God. “Not pushed off on you.”

“He didn’t push it off,” said the Prince, following him up. “He asked. And there’s this: when I was writing it out—what I saw, what you saw—I was able to understand better how the whole thing went. If it helps me learn how to anticipate your methods more quickly when we’re out in the field, well—” The Prince shrugged. “I can be of more use.”

They came up into the sitting room, where lamps were lit and the fire was burning, and the feeling of welcome and peace in the room draped itself all over the Prince like the warmth of the Shadowcloak when it was over them both, even briefly. He sighed in sheer pleasure. “Tea?”

The God simply nodded, wandering over to gaze out the window at the deepening evening.

The Prince went in to start the kettle, then drifted out again to stand by the table near the couch. There his tablets and stylus were scattered, and he picked them up to bring them over to the smaller table by his chair; but as he straightened, his eye fell on the stone-stoppered glass vial full of grey water. And once again he shivered. “Now that Hermes isn’t in the neighborhood—”

The God followed his glance and went to the table, picked up the vial, went back into the kitchen with it, said nothing.

But the Prince wasn’t willing to let this rest there. The God came back in to pause before the fire, and the Prince looked through the shadows to catch whatever glimpse of those eyes he might in the firelight. “What was all that about, then?”

For some moments the God said nothing. But then he looked up. “Prince,” he said, “you have to know—I would never. It didn’t need any oath.” He sounded flustered; he sounded abashed. “I would _never_ do that to you.”

 _—Interfere with the memory or thought or heart…_ “Heart,” the Prince said. “A god could even change _that_?”

“That’s how the oath’s wording goes, Prince,” the God said, quite cool, even dismissive. “In order to cover all the possibilities, I believe. I must confess hearts wouldn’t be my area of expertise to begin with, as I’m reliably informed that I don’t have one.” And he snorted softly under his breath. “And as for other Gods’ ability to do so… it wouldn’t be in the basic skillset for most of them. Otherwise why would so many of them have so much trouble when they fall in love with mortals?”

He moved away to gaze out the window for a moment, his shoulders working a bit, as if they felt stiff. “There are a few exceptions to the rule, of course. Eros, perhaps,” he said, swinging back toward the Prince again, “you’d really not want to venture anywhere near the butts when he’s out on the range getting in his target practice.” And he chuckled, the mood suddenly seeming to lighten. “And then of course there’s my Mummy.”

“What, Athena?”

The God laughed at him. “No, Aphrodite. …Well, I _say_ Mummy. It’s complicated.”

The Prince ran a hand through his hair. “Yes, can we talk about that? Not now: tomorrow perhaps. Because I’m getting incredibly confused.”

“I could believe it.” The God turned away almost with relief. “Tomorrow, of course.”

“And I don’t care what you say, you really need to get some sleep pretty soon. Think how long you’ve been up.”

“In a while, Prince.”

The kettle clicked off: the Prince went in to make the tea, then looked around the kitchen for a few moments. Behind him he heard the God sit down in his own chair and stretch his legs out with a small grunt. “Are those feeling better?” the Prince said.

“Much. I’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

“Good. So come on,” the Prince said, “you have to eat something. Is there anything left of what we had last night? That Ch’inese.”

“There might be. _Thalastrae?”_

“Coming!” said four or five voices at once.

***

Two hours later, despite the second wind that eating something had given him, despite the lit lamps and the tea the Prince had been drinking, he glanced up to find that he’d blinked between one line of writing and the next—or so he’d thought—and the lamp nearest him on his little side table had noticeably burned down. Not a few seconds, or a few breaths: a few minutes.

He sighed. “I’ve done all I can with this for tonight,” the Prince said, and dropped the stylus wearily, rubbing his eyes. “And you—how are you even conscious?”

The God was sitting in his chair as he had been for all this while since their light supper, watching the Prince slave over his writing and making the occasional sardonic or amusing comment while in between times plucking or sawing away at his bowed lyre. “I’m a God,” he said. “It helps.” And he yawned.

“Yes, and flirting with Hypnos at the moment,” said the Prince. “Don’t think I can’t see. You’ll cause a scandal.” He smiled a little at the joke. “Meanwhile, I’m beyond flirting. And every time you yawn, I do it harder.”

“You should get some sleep then, Prince,” said the God, glancing up from the strings of his instrument. “Go on. That will keep.”

The Prince dropped his hands in his lap then, looked at them; looked up. “You were saying this afternoon that housemates should know the worst about each other?”

He could feel the God raising his eyebrows at him. “Yes?”

“I shout in my sleep sometimes,” said the Prince. “Bad dreams.”

The God’s whole attention was suddenly focused on him. “What about?”

The Prince paused. For some reason he hadn’t been expecting the question, which most people back in the Kingdom didn’t ask, either not wishing to pry or already having heard the rumors. But the God, as the Prince was learning, was definitely not most people, and simply looked at him, waiting.

“When I was at war,” the Prince said. “My wound. Or maybe more often, the wounds of others I couldn’t heal.” He shook his head. “It’s nothing, really—”

“It’s not,” the God said. His gaze rested most intensely on the Prince from inside his shadows, and his eyes glinted. “And you can stop worrying about that now, because no such thing will ever happen to you here. I forbid it.”

“That’d be nice,” the Prince said. But then he realized that the God was looking at him steadily, almost angrily, in the manner of someone who wants you to know that he absolutely means what he says. “What?” he said. “You can actually do that?”

“Can and will,” said the God, and he sounded grim. “My House knows its master’s will, and it will never allow such things near you while you sleep under its roof. _That_ I swear by Styx’s flood. And with pleasure.”

The Prince looked at the God in amazement. Then he swallowed. “Thank you,” he said.

“Think nothing of it,” the God said, looking into the fire and waving a hand in the air. “The least I can do.”

The Prince nodded, and then smiled. “Think I’ll go take that idea on a test run, then,” he said, “because I can’t keep these eyes open any longer. Promise me you won’t stay up too late.”

“I promise,” said the God.

“Good night, then.” The Prince started for the stairs, and in the doorway, paused. “Oh, one thing?”

There was no seeing the eyes, in this dim lighting and with the fire behind, but the God gazed up at him. “You’re right: no oath was needed,” the Prince said. “And you should know that I know it isn't.”

The God merely nodded. The Prince raised a hand and headed up the stairs.

***

The God didn’t move; just sat and watched the Prince take himself and his very mortal thoughts on up the stairs and out of sight. _There was a time,_ he thought, _when I would have scorned even the idea of listening to such things. But now…_

Now there was a curious attraction to them, simple though they might be. Up the stairs they went, the Prince putting his mind in order as he bade farewell to the day. _…So tired. Going to be so good to stretch out. But must get up early so I can get that stuff finished for Hermes. Leave the curtains open so the light will wake me. What a day. What a couple of days. And the God. This has all been so… well, so amazing. So fantastic.…_

The thoughts didn’t last too much longer. Quite shortly the Prince was on his couch, with sleep running up the shores of his mind like a swiftly incoming tide, and welcome soft darkness descending over them like Night herself over the sea. It was a strange sensation to experience this way, for the God always saw sleep in one of two ways—either the abstract enemy that couldn’t be held off forever, or as the shape that could always be spotted at family meetings or formal councils of the Gods, not a shadowy form but always an indistinct one, a patchwork of chaotic greyscale shapes (for the God did not dream in color) and a terrible conversationalist.

For a good while more he sat by the fire, gently plucking at the strings of the bowed lyre and gazing across at the left-hand chair—unoccupied now, but not precisely empty. It was strange, the sense of completion that had settled over this room in the past couple of days; unexpected, almost bemusing. Indeed it had thrown certain parts of his mind into an unaccustomed—well, ‘turmoil’ was hardly the word, it was nothing so dramatic as that. But now he found himself in a strange quandary. He’d still not precisely _solved_ his Godmother’s case: the solution was at best in abeyance, or awaiting completion, for as he’d said, a mortal’s position on Olympus was going to be in need of careful definition and regularization. Fortunately it looked as if there would be time to sort that out before it became problematic.

 _Because I said ‘There are dangerous things out there…’, and yet when the game’s on, there he is too. Brave. Steady. Quick to adapt. Clever for a mortal, or even for a minor God. Useful, and intent on being more so. Methodical. Humorous. Likeable_ — Even though that would have been a currency that the Consulting God wouldn’t normally have cared about one way or another. Now, though, for the Prince, it was proving useful. Even Hermes was finding the Prince so, which was, as the God had predicted, going to be helpful. _And the minute he becomes indispensable, I’ve won…_

And as if attracted by that thought, by some intrinsic challenge in it, the God became aware of a sudden shadow that gathered itself together in the doorway: not one of his own.

“Promises,” its voice said. “A lot of them in the air around here, of late. Hardly the usual order of business.”

The breath hissed out of the God in annoyance, somewhat tempered by the weariness that he absolutely refused to display in this company. “I’ve had enough reminders of the dysfunctionality of families today,” the God said softly, not looking up. “I hardly needed another. What are you doing here, Mykroft?”

“I think you know quite well, brother. Now that Argeiphontês has officially taken notice, so must I. A _mortal?”_

“Yes. Butt out, Mykroft.”

“I’ve pulled his file,” said the tall dark shape that sauntered into the room with his close-furled staff of office hooked over his arm.

“Of course you have. How could anyone ever get you to decline the pleasure of spying on my doings.”

“I’m trying to be forearmed against _others_ who may be interested in spying on your doings, brother. Olympus is called ‘the Home of the _Gods’_ for a reason. Mortals aren’t strictly legal here.”

“May I remind you of Ganymede, Mykroft? _You_ were involved in putting out that little brushfire, as I recall.”

“And endless trouble it caused too, even at that level. I’m just trying to warn you to be circumspect. The fewer Gods who know he’s here, the safer he’ll be.”

“Fine. I’ve taken precautions, as even you must have noticed. Are we done?”

“No. You need to know—”

“No I don’t. And get out of his chair!”

Mykroft ignored him as he sat down. “I’m trying to spare you pain, brother. This mortal is going to have trust issues.”

 _“All_ mortals have trust issues, Mykroft, don’t be tiresome. He has none with _me_ , and that’s what counts.”

“You don’t understand the danger to which his presence here will expose you.”

“Please, Mykroft, spare me your institutional paranoia. Which god are you planning to sell me to this time, so that you can be proven right after the fact?”

His brother bristled. “Despite your own paranoia, brother mine, I’ve _never_ sold you, bartered you, or even leased you to any god. Not once. Ichor is thicker than water.”

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could actually _prove_ that? Pity it can’t be done. You’re always so careful never to leave anything behind you that could be construed as proof.”

“Brother, _please_ … listen to me just this once. Be careful. Other gods have suffered embarrassment, even indignity at your hands. Some of them wouldn’t mind seeing you take a fall to teach you some manners. And you’ve been so… scathing with some of them about their own descents into the business of relationships with mortals. Their interest if your relationship becomes public knowledge will produce serious problems.” Mykroft turned to look into the fire. “The King of the Gods is a very busy individual, granted. Far too busy to involve himself in a junior deity’s dalliances. Possibly even a touch indulgent to a favorite grandchild, willing to look the other way when unsubstantiated rumors are in the air. But if the matter should ever be brought directly to Zeus’s attention by someone with a grudge…”

The Consulting God waved his bow languidly. “Yes, yes, noted. Thank you for your input.”

“Brother,” Mykroft said, “I must be clear in my own mind that you understand what you’ve done. The Prince has made you a promise while you were both standing on Olympus’s soil. If he breaks it, the laws that apply to promises made on this ground by the normal inhabitants—meaning immortals—cannot apply to him. The responsibility will fall on _you:_ you will be the promise’s guarantor, whether you like it or not. If the promise is ever broken, _you_ will pay the price.”

The Consulting God yawned. “As if I don’t already know. Now kindly take yourself away before my Prince’s sleep is disturbed by your bird-of-ill-omen croaking. He’s had a busy couple of days and he needs his rest.”

Mykroft rose slowly, hooking his dark-furled staff of office over his arm again. “Brother, one last thing. If ever he _should_ see you revealed—”

“He won’t. He promised.”

“The promises of mortals,” Mykroft said softly. “On your own head be it, brother. You may be setting out on a path where not even I can help you up if you fall.”

The Consulting God snorted. “Spare me your superfluous concern, Mykroft. I’m not three days old any more.”

Mykroft sighed. “No,” he said, sounding sad: “no, you are not.”

The Consulting God got up out of his chair. “Good of you to notice. And that being the case, I’ll bid you good night, as I have a promise to keep.” He leaned his bowed lyre against the arm of his chair and swept off down the hall toward his room. Behind him he could feel his brother melt into his own shadows, taking himself away.

The God closed his door and went to his own couch… but not without a shiver.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	17. Of the Prince’s New Project and the Shadow of a Shadow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Healer-Prince meets an unexpected housemate and revives a dormant literary form; the Consulting God fills in some blanks in his backstory, and senses trouble coming.
> 
> Warnings for slightly-higher mathematics, potentially embarrassing God-gossip, ancient networking technology, proto-teabagging, more wine-dark wine (the ’98 vintage really was very nice), and a cloud on the (event) horizon no bigger than a man’s hand. …Oh, and bees again. (Why are you even surprised?)

The Prince woke just after dawn and lay there on his couch for a few moments, looking at the ceiling, breathing, chasing the memory of a dream. _And not an ill one…_

He let out a long breath that he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. That by itself was a matter for wonder—that it wasn’t the dream doing the chasing, and the Prince wearily fleeing it down the corridors of night, with no real hope of ever winning the race. The subject had come up so late last night that he hadn’t really had time to get to grips with it. But the prospect of never again having to fear waking up gasping in such pain that even your screams were frozen in your throat, though you felt sure you were bleeding your life out; or better still, never again to have to bend weeping over the broken body of some boy hardly old enough to hold a spear, and then awaken in the chilly, lonely dark with your eyes full of the sight of _his_ eyes going vague, the soul fading out of them….

 _Never again while I’m here._ The Prince could barely imagine what that would be like—for that eternally cloudy part of his present life’s sky so suddenly and miraculously to clear. _That alone, no matter for how long or short a time it might last, that alone will be Heaven indeed. Thank you, all Gods, for this. Or one God in particular…_

The Prince smiled as he swung off the couch and went to look out the window, where beyond Olympus’s mighty shoulder the sky was going rosy with dawn. _And that Dawn? Two nights ago I was in the stable where she keeps her horses._ His smile spread out into a grin as he shook his head. _Two nights ago I rode a flying horse and helped save a man’s soul. Yesterday I talked face to face with the Messenger of the Gods and petted the snakes on the very Caduceus itself. Last night I helped solve the second murder in as many days. What on Earth or above it is going to happen_ next?

_Let’s go find out -- !_

He threw on a clean tunic and soft braided-leather house shoes and headed quietly downstairs into the sitting room. All was still; the Thalastrae weren’t about, and the God might still be abed for all he knew. Regardless, the fire in the little grate, which never seemed to go out, was burning very low but steady and warm in the dim but growing light of morning.

Idly the Prince wandered over to the shelf above the fireplace and looked at the things laid out there: the little glazed case of mummified bats; a strange but beautiful knife that seemed to be made of many knives bolted together, with one of its simpler blades piercing through a pile of very delicate parchments and driven deep into the shelf’s wood; a skull, old and dry and empty-eyed, but somehow looking benign in the slowly-growing morning light.

The Prince reached out to it and stood there softly running his fingers over the top of the skull, stroking the jagged places where the separate bones had long before joined and fused. So strange, it was, to find so unmistakable a token or reminder of mortality in an immortal’s house. _But then when Death and his dark Lady are his Godparents, why not?.._. “And what about you?” he said under his breath, feeling a peculiar kinship. “How do _you_ do today?”

 _Very well, Iaon Dasosarchëidês_ , the skull said silently.

The Prince blinked. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind about the source of the words: they were themselves as dry and cool as bone—quite unlike those of the Thalastrae, whose voices all sounded of breathy young-womanish warmth and life, be they ever so invisible..

“Uh, that’s good,” said the Prince. He was getting beyond the point where he found much of anything surprising. “Excellent.”

_And how are you doing this morning?_

“Very well, thank you for asking,” said the Prince. And there the courtesies drilled into him all these years in preparation for kingship and its challenges simply ran out, or ran dry, because he had absolutely _no_ idea where to go from here.

_Long day yesterday, I take it?_

“It was unusual,” the Prince said, “and no mistake.”

_But you’re settling in well?_

“Just fine so far,” the Prince said. “Can’t complain at all.”

_That’s very good._

“Will you bear with me a second?” said the Prince. “I’ll be right back.”

He went into the kitchen, drew water from the tap into the kettle, and put it on to boil: then brought down the pot he’d been using for the tea and shook some of the dark leaves into it from their little bag. _I wonder,_ he thought while he rinsed the pot out, _what one might do if one didn’t want to make so much tea all at once. And the leaves are kind of a nuisance to clean out of this. …Perhaps if you took little squares of very fine linen, you could put small servings of the tea leaves in them and tie them up, so you could make one cup at a time…_

It was a thought to experiment with later. He thought the God might be interested: experimentation seemed to be a favorite theme with him. Leaving the water to boil, the Prince went back out to the fireplace and leaned on its overshelf, gazing thoughtfully at the skull. “So how do you come to be here?” he said.

 _I was the housing of the brain of a prophet,_ said the skull. _A sort of prophet, anyway. Though that mind is gone into Elysium, yet from so long having been its intimate, I know many things that are, and were, and are yet to be_.

“That’s got to be useful,” said the Prince.

_Though the yet-to-be ones will routinely only be ones you have in your head already._

“Um,” said the Prince. “You would have to be a prophet to quite clever people, then, to achieve the best results.”

 _That’s true,_ said the skull. _It was therefore more or less inevitable that soon or late I would find myself here; for Archetype takes care of its own._

“That’s good,” said the Prince, though he wasn’t quite sure what this meant: in any case, the skull sounded satisfied. “By any chance, have you seen the master of the house this morning?”

_He went out to the garden, Prince._

The Prince nodded. “Thank you.”

 _Lest you get the wrong idea,_ said the Skull, _I do not watch or see all that happens here. I wake when there’s attention on me, and speak when there’s need for me to be spoken to. So the Master of the House uses me, to think out loud and clarify his thoughts to himself. I would hope, Prince, that you’d feel at ease doing the same. What I hear remains unheard by any other._

“Yes,” the Prince said. “Thanks for letting me know. Sometimes a listening ear would be welcome. There’s so much here that’s…”

 _Unusual?_ said the Skull.

The Prince grinned as the kettle clicked off, patting the top of the Skull. “So true,” he said, and went in to make the tea.

When the pot was full and brewing the Prince went to the front windows, gazed out. Down there among the rosebushes, about halfway along the garden path, he saw a slender shape, all dark in his closest-wrapped shadows and with the blue overrobe thrown over all, now hunkered down in front of the little square beehive. The Prince gazed down at him in silent admiration. He had been thinking in a quiet way for a couple of days now about the God’s easy grace: it seemed impossible for him to move in any way that was clumsy or awkward. Now here he was squatted down in a manner that on almost any other being would have seemed a bit clumsy… but on him it simply looked as if he had made himself comfortable a bit nearer to the ground than usual.

The Prince turned away to pause by the desk, looking again at his writings for Hermes, the ones he wanted to finish this morning. While he’d been working on them last night, though, the back of his mind had been worrying at the offhand, casual challenge with which the God had issued him. _How to get the word out about a new deity?_ the Prince had thought. _I’m in a better-than-usual position to do something about that._ _And it’s not just because I’ve suddenly found myself up here, either._

He picked up the first tabletful of matter-of-fact case-notes and glanced over it. _These may be what Hermes needs,_ the Prince thought, _but they’re dry as dust. If the God’s tale’s to be told so that anyone cares about it, the cases need a little more meat put on their bones. Structure that says something about the suspense of being right_ in _them, the way events unfold, the way point of view affects how things look. And they need personality_. The Prince smiled to himself. _Nobody cares particularly about Athena being goddess of battle in the abstract. What gets them interested is hearing about her losing her temper in Zeus’s throne room and decking out Ares in front of all the Gods, leaving him lying there on the floor flat as a new-landed flounder. They need to hear about the Consulting God_ that _way._ In his mind the Prince could see the God sweeping through the darkness to root out clues, silhouetted against the fire and telling his dark fairy-tale of deduction as the shadows crept inexorably in toward the hearth in Tiryns, and a King and Queen sat frozen with fear as the Truth found them out. That’s _what his stories need. A sense of his brilliance, that kind of scary excitement…_

The Prince put the tablets down and went back into the kitchen to pour out the tea, rummaging for the cups again in the cupboard and once again discovering that they weren’t where he’d found them before. _No matter, why should anything stay put here? Everything else always seems to be on the move…_

A breath of air coming in from the hallway direction brought his head around. “You’re up early,” said one of the Thalastrae behind him as she came in.

“True,” the Prince said, finding the mugs and bringing them down. “You know, I was having a thought earlier… Can we get hold of some little squares of linen? You know, the wide-weave kind they wrap cheeses in?”

“Of course,” the invisible woman said, “I’ll look into that for you. Don’t need it right away, do you?”

The Prince laughed. “Not at all, no rush.” Then he glanced out toward the sitting room. “By the way, one thing—”

Apparently she saw where his glance was directed. “Oh, spoke to you finally, did he? Surprised it took him this long. But he gets these shy moods sometimes.”

The Prince nodded as after more searching he turned up the little crock with the honey in it, and the horn spoon he’d been using with it. “Whose skull was he?”

“Somebody who was interested in what goes on inside people’s heads, apparently,” said Thalastrae. “But something must have happened to him quite early on, because he keeps saying he’s Young.”

“Oh,” said the Prince. He hadn’t really looked at how fully the bone’s sutures had knit: he made a note to have a look later. “Well, maybe he’ll tell me something about it later…”

He picked up the mugs and carefully headed through the sitting room and down the stairs with them, musing as he went. _So what length of poem to start with? He’s a new god and the tales will take a while to spread, so short’s probably best at first. Something you could listen to in one piece while the servants are refreshing the guests’ wine after dinner and the bard’s warming up for the big heavy poem. A hundred, hundred fifty lines, no more. At least to start with…_

The Prince hadn’t had time to think such thoughts for too long a while. Storytelling in poetry would have been part of most noblemens’ lives, though his own world had become so full of more concrete work in the last few years that there hadn’t been much time for it. Nonetheless, like any other princeling raised in his part of the world, his education had included the extemporaneous composition of poetry, and he’d also been expected to be able to memorize and recite a poem on only hearing it once or twice, so that a new bard coming through could take a song or tale along elsewhere with him when he left.

As the House’s front door swung open for him, the Prince found himself thinking for the first time in many years of his verse tutor, a hard crusty old man with a terrible temper, and way too fond of the strap. But there had been no question of the quality of his memory, in which hundreds of poems were stored; or of his passion, from which flowed his ruthless insistence that the Prince learn the classics exactly, and in their best versions, without so much as a dropped inflection. Once he’d had the classics down pat, therefore, and had learned all the available stock epithets for objects, men and Gods, the Prince had been well equipped to put together a brief poem about almost any subject that presented itself. _And now,_ he thought, _I’ve got something really interesting to make poems about…!_ The thought of trying to get the God’s dark intensity and verve and _dash_ into words that people would be hot to repeat to each other was already beginning to make the Prince itch with eagerness to get started. _But there are a couple of things to handle first…_

The shadowy figure crouched down in front of the hive turned its head at the sound of his footsteps on the walk, and now stood up and stretched, his shadows falling down about him again, as the Prince approached. “Tea?” the Prince said, holding out the second mug.

“Thank you.” The God took it, sipped at it. ”A quiet night?”

“Yes. Thank _you.”_

The God simply nodded and looked away as he drank, almost as if uncomfortable, though the Prince couldn’t think why this might be. _Maybe he’s just not a morning person,_ the Prince thought. Certainly his father hadn’t been: the King used to mutter that only a boor was so rude as to surprise the Dawn when she was still in her nightgown. _Father…_ the Prince thought, and his heart clenched.

 _Later._ _But not too much later._ He looked at the hive, where already there was a surprising amount of activity as the earliest flowers out around the edges of the garden were opening and the bees were going out to them. “This is why you do the thing with the Shadowcloak down at the end of the walk,” the Prince said.

The God nodded and had another drink of tea. “It annoys the bees,” he said.

“They sting?”

“Oh no, much worse. They go on strike. Don’t you _like_ honey in this?” And he waggled the tea mug at the Prince.

The concept of bees that might stop working _because they felt like it_ left the Prince briefly more bemused than at almost anything that had happened to him so far. “Uh, I take your point.”

“And there are other reasons. Just don’t annoy them.”

“Right. And what else annoys your bees?”

A deep dark chuckle. “Don’t worry, they’ll let you know.”

For a little while they stood there quietly together in the still cool of the morning, not speaking, just drinking their tea and watching the light grow and open out over the heights of Olympus, the sky paling from rose toward a paler pinkish-gold. “I was thinking,” the Prince said eventually, “about what I mentioned yesterday: about writing up your cases for a wider audience. And also about your apparently nonfunctional poets.”

“Don’t waste time blaming them, Prince,” the God said, sounding quite dry. “I was jesting with you. I don’t have poets.”

“True. You’ve just got one,” said the Prince, with a slight smile.

The God’s quizzical look was visible even though his shadows, the growing morning catching in his eyes.

“Well. Remember the ‘prophecy’ you sent out? You did that as one of your texts, right?”

“Of course.”

“And the writeup that’s going to Hermes later this morning—that’ll go the same way?”

“Nearly,” the God said. “Longer messages and documents, those go as attachments on the same carrier. Hermes’ local information network connects into the Arachneia, the West Wind Web, which in turn—”

“Whoa, slow down,” the Prince said. “These things go out via the Wind, anyway. And he speaks in a lot of ears along the way. Priests, prophets… poets…”

“Yes,” the God said.

“So things I wrote could go the same way.”

“So they could,” the God said, looking at him curiously.

“I’m thinking about doing sort of a _bios logismos_ ,” said the Prince. “That was one of the things my old tutor called it, a writing exercise he used to make me do when I was getting started with verse. Putting a life’s acts into words, in casual mode: an episodic thing. But this would be about a God’s acts rather than a man’s. Or as well as. Partly the story of where you came from, why you do what you do. But also partly stories of the actual things that happen; like what we did the other night, here and in Tiryns.”

The God actually scowled as he waved his hand and turned away. “Prince, it’s the Work that matters, really. Personalities are irrelevant. They shouldn’t enter into it.”

“But if they don’t, my God,” the Prince said, “people will never understand the cases. You can’t just spill the facts out naked, like somebody putting some poor bare statue up in the _agora_ to be stared at. No one will _get_ it. People need the paint that brings the statue to life, they need the color, they need to see the attributes associated with whatever God that statue’s of, the objects or weapons in its hands and the clothes it wears. It’s like that with a story. People need to hear about how you look and act when you’re deducing as _well_ as how you think: what you _did_ while you were explaining it to me or Hermes, as well as what you explained. _Then_ they’ll understand. Yes, of course it’s all about learning to think. But to do that, people need to hear how the cases unfold, and especially they need to feel what’s at the bottom of them. The loves, the hates. The dangers you expose yourself to, to find the truth.”

The God didn’t turn around right away; but neither did he start issuing denials. The Prince simply drank most of the rest of his tea, and held himself quiet, and waited.

“Prince,” the God said at last, “where the cases are concerned, it’s the _facts_ that matter. The business of finding out the truth, the quickest way, the best way. I won’t have the clean path to the truth wrapped up in fripperies and fancy language.”

“Of course not,” said the Prince. “Useless ornament, who needs that? Too many poets get so busy showing off obscure inflections and sticking stock epithets all over everything that they lose sight of the meat of the story entirely. But someone should tell what _happens_ on a case. And if it’s a mere mortal telling it, well, sorry, a little excitement might creep in. But I promise I’ll try to keep it under control.” _Though only just enough to make you happy,_ the Prince thought. For by his reckoning, the excitement of what they’d been through just on the first night would have any hall full of after-dinner mortals sitting on the edges of their seats no matter how much wine they’d swilled down their faces at the preceeding feast. “Because it’s worth telling, worth _hearing_.”

The God was now giving him one of those obscure looks from under his shadows, hard to read, his head tilted a little. But from what he could see of the God’s eyes, the Prince was reminded of the look he’d seen on first telling the God that his deductions were brilliant—like someone who’d been caught off guard by something he’d never really expected to hear. “Prince,” he said, “you surprise me; you have hidden depths. I’d not really have thought of you operating in this mode.”

The Prince had to laugh at that. “Well, I haven’t had time for it much myself of late. But I guess things change. And I hope I can keep surprising you.”

“I hope you can too,” the God said softly. “But I suspect you will. There’s nothing ‘mere’ about your mortality.”

Then he breathed out, and the way he was holding himself changed all of a sudden; some of the Prince’s very controlled excitement seemed to get into the way the God was holding himself, the way his shoulders braced up. “All right,” the God said, and turned back to the Prince: and even through the shadows he could tell that the God was smiling. “All right, if it’ll make you happy.”

 _He has to put it that way,_ the Prince thought. _Why is he so shy of admitting it might make him happy too? But never mind._ “It will,” he said. “Thank you. When we get in you can show me how to—”

And then he broke off, startled, because something had just flown at his face in a little breath of its own wind; and then the next thing he knew, there was a bee sitting on the end of his nose.

He was about to reach up to brush it away as gently as he could when a hand was suddenly laid on his left wrist, curling around it, holding him still. “No, Prince,” said the dark voice from close beside him, very low. “Don’t move… just let her taste you. She stands very high in the Queen’s counsels.”

The Prince stayed still, able for the moment to spare only a thought to wonder which affected him more: the feeling of little delicate feet clinging onto his nose, or the touch of warm long fingers on his wrist, a quick glance downward having shown him how the usually-obscuring shadow for once wasn’t veiling them. It was a strong hand but also a graceful one, and though he knew how powerful its grip could be, now he could feel it just in resting mode, gentle, though also lingering over the pulse point. The Prince restrained his smile—the God wasn’t the only one who knew that trick—and then was distracted again by the little feet walking up to the bridge of his nose, and two tiny oval eyes staring into his while thread-thin golden antennae waved curiously at him.

“This is he,” the God said to the Bee: “the one I told you of. Know him, and do him no harm.”

The Prince went a bit crosseyed meeting that dark, obscure gaze as its small owner walked right up between his eyes, tickling with her antennae as she did the very fine hairs at the top of his nose, just where he would pinch it sometimes when things got too much for him. Then with a tiny breath of air like a focused sigh that made him blink when it brushed his eyelashes, the Bee’s wings flurried into a blur and she was away again, heading back to the hive. The Prince let out a breath.

“Surely you didn’t think she was going to sting you?” the God said, letting his wrist go.

“Frankly I didn’t know what to think. Around here she might have started dancing a hornpipe, or burst into song.”

“They don’t sing, but they do dance,” the God said, amused. “It’s a language. I hope to have time to learn it fully some day.”

“You mean you don’t know it fully already?” The Prince finished his tea.

The God sighed. “The Work keeps me very busy, Prince. Moments like this are too few.”

They started ambling back toward the House, the Prince gazing idly at the door as they got closer. “I meant to ask. Why just two hundred twenty-one bees?”

“Just?” the God said, now sounding both amused and mysterious. “There’s no ‘just’ about it. The number’s nuanced, Prince. The sum of five consecutive prime numbers, as well as the sum of nine consecutive primes. A unique distinction.”

“Unique to you, maybe,” the Prince said, shaking his head. “Fractions are about as much as I needed to handle at home, for dispensary work, and my tutor despaired of ever getting anything higher than _geomatria_ into me.”

“All the same, the secret of the number’s power -- that’s better not mentioned to anyone outside the House. There are those who might start understanding things too well…”

The God actually sounded a little uneasy. The Prince simply nodded. “It’s safe with me.” And then a thought struck him. “But what about yesterday when Hermes came by? He’s here all the time, surely. So why was he having trouble with them? Surely you must have told the Bees not to harm him either?”

From inside the shadows came a somewhat muffled snort. “I expect I did. I’m sure I don’t remember.”

“Don’t give me that,” the Prince said, amused. “You remember everything, don’t you? Unless you make yourself forget. What was it you called it? Deletion?”

“Yes. Well… he’ll come into your story too, won’t he. A word or so about him here and there wouldn’t come amiss. Though so many of his stories are known…”

“Yours first,” said the Prince. “He’s had hundreds of years’ worth of songs sung about him. You, not so much. So you first.”

“Certainly. Won’t take long.”

***

This turned out to be a gross miscalculation, if not an intentional falsehood. What _did_ take very little time was rereading and adding the final touches to the case material for Hermes. It was all done and gone in an hour, the God showing the Prince how the House would allow a piece of writing to be simply pulled off its tablet into the air, the words displayed there for checking, then an address spoken and all vanished away, en route to its intended recipient a breath later.

And then what the Prince had thought would be the work of minutes—knowing how the God normally spouted out his deductions regarding the intimate lives of other people—began to unfold itself as something rather more complicated. Light meals were brought and eaten, the Sun’s light tracked across the sitting room, and the Prince had to ask the Thalastrae three times for fresh tablets. _And how many pots of that tea have we had already? We’re going to need more. A trip to that Tesko or whatever it is tonight, perhaps…_

Meanwhile the Prince was in his chair again and once more juggling mug and tablet and stylus and trying to keep his questions in order, because every time he asked the God one, it would provoke five or ten more, like a little informational Hydra. The God’s pedigree itself was an issue for significant confusion, and showed no signs of clearing up from whichever end the Prince tried to get to grips with it.

“…So let me see if I’ve got this straight now. No father.”

“Boring. None needed.”

“But your mothers—”

“Are the Muses.”

“At least four of them…. But not all?”

“We’re never been entirely sure. It often seems best to assume all of the Nine were involved, as they have something of a tendency to hunt in a pack.”

The Prince spluttered at the image and put the tea safely aside. “But at least four.”

“Well, that many were willing to admit after the fact that something had _happened_. I have never, of course, been able to discount the possibility that one or another of the four had chosen to take the heat for one or more of her sisters…”

“Oh my God,” the Prince said, once again far more in the exclamatory mode than as a mode of address. “One _or more.”_

“…and since the interrelationships among the Nine are always changing, as is normal among a large group of creative talents who also happen to share parents but have very different interests, it’s rather like solving an _n_ -body problem where the delta-v of any given body may increase or decrease without warning…”

“You promised me you were going to keep the maths simple.”

“Sorry, it’s hard to be simple about such a complex problem, but doubtless you’ll manage it somehow.”

“And didn’t we also speak about keeping the snark under control while we’re working on this?”

“Um, yes, so we did.”

“Just a reminder. So, moving on. Then there’s Pallas Athene…”

“Yes.”

The Prince nodded, working (as he’d been doing all morning and afternoon, with varying degrees of success) to keep his face straight. “She being, as I’ve always understood it…”

“A virgin goddess, yes Prince, let’s not be tiresome about it. Doubtless you’d now like to make some witty comment about virginity running in my family, due to the unusual situation surrounding my Mummy’s own conception, if you can call swallowing your sexual partner whole a conception, and subsequent delivery, which may or may not be the right word for someone hitting the King of the Gods in the head with an axe.”

“Um,” the Prince said. He paused, then, and rubbed his head for ten breaths or so as he tried to make sense of what happened next. “So Athena and the Muses got together, and then…”

“Aphrodite,” said the God.

“So you said,” said the Prince, shaking his head in absolute wonder. “And she kissed them _all.”_

“Every one. There is a _possibility_ … never actually confirmed, mind you, but some circumstantial evidence suggests it… that she might have kissed two or three of the Muses _more than once.”_

The Prince shook his head. “It’s a wonder there’s not more than one of _you.”_

“I believe that to be impossible,” said the God, sounding a bit smug. “But I take your point.” And then he chuckled. “There was apparently brief concern that the event could have caused some kind of local cataclysm. But it seems that besides my conception, the side effects were limited to some cracks in the plaster and plates falling off of shelves.”

“All right…”

“You’re pinching your nose again, my Prince.”

“Yes, yes I would be. Look, I’ve got to rationalize this somehow, at least in my own head, so it makes _some_ kind of sense on wax. Now normally…”

“Prince, I deduce that you’re about to use the words ‘Normally’ and ‘Mount Olympus’ in the same sentence. Perhaps an alternative approach would prove less oxymoronic.”

“…when a God and a Goddess love each other _very much…”_

“There’d be times when even I’d agree that such conditions would make things simpler. However…”

“…then the daddy God and the mummy God hold each other in a _very special way…”_

“Which does not necessarily involve intercourse except in the term’s strictly social context.”

“Why was I was afraid you were going to say that?”

“Well, for example, just keeping it in the family, when you consider Zeus and Metis…”

“Having apparently developed a masochistic streak a cubit wide since I arrived here, I was just coming back to that.” The Prince cleared his throat. “He _swallowed_ the entire Goddess of Wisdom—the entire _pregnant_ Goddess of Wisdom—after discovering that any son she bore him would overthrow him.”

“Yes, topologically speaking it’s a challenging prospect, but by no means impossible if the event is considered more as an inclusion function than as a strict embedding. If you’ll just take a moment to consider—”

“I’m trying to avoid doing that _at all._ Let’s move on to considering some earlier missed opportunities instead. Couldn’t a lot of fuss and bother been avoided by Zeus simply checking with the oracles before getting down to it with her? I mean, it’s not like he would have had to go out of his way. Apollo the Lord of Prophecy lives _right there.”_

“A little more to the right, and down a bit. Prince, as an educated man like you has no doubt noticed, my kingly Grandfather rarely pauses long enough between the _‘Oooo, mama’_ and _‘let’s hook up’_ stages to insert any thinking-through when it comes to the ladies. Or occasionally the gentlemen.” The God smirked so hard that it positively burned through his shadows with an invisibly malicious glow, and all the more distant shadows gathering in the corners of the room snickered a bit evilly.

The Prince instantly dropped the perfectly reasonable follow-up question of why Zeus never simply asked Apollo to find out what the gender of Metis’s baby was, as he sensed something much juicier had just fallen into his lap. “That, now, that _right there,_ has to do with someone in your family, doesn’t it.”

A sudden silence. “Lucky guess.”

“Not at all. A shot in the dark, but plainly a good one. Because, my dear God, I _know_ that tone of voice. It’s one my sister uses when she’s describing something dumb I’ve done, and one I use on her similarly. And I’m not too proud to admit the usage, nor so stupid as to fail to recognize it when someone else does. So: half-brother? Half-sister? You must have plenty of them scattered around the landscape, divine or even otherwise, as the Muses haven’t been shy about getting down to business with mortals when it suits them. Poets in particular… though I’ll grant you, you’d have a hard time working out which poets had really done the deed and for which ones it was just wishful thinking.”

“Yes, quite. Moving right along…”

“And noting you trying to avoid the sibling end of things, my God, so don’t think I’m fooled. We’ll just save that for another time, because why would we want to exhaust all the useful material at once? After all, this is serial drama. The motto is ‘Make them laugh, make them cry, make them _wait_ —’”

“Speaking of which. _Thalastrae!_ We need some wine in here now. All this tea is starting to make me jangle.”

“Oh no, no wine for _me_ just yet, thank you very much. _I_ wasn’t pushed up onto the golden Cypriot shore by some wave that just now came rolling up the sand, regardless of whose Mummy might have arrived there that way.”

“Seen that statue, have you? She rather favors it. The sculptor forgot to add on the Graces, though, there was a terrible ruckus about that...”

“Cut it out now. I know what you’re trying to pull.”

“Ah now, Prince, how can you turn this down. Here it comes, thank you, Thalastrae. Just look at that colour.”

“I’m averting my eyes, O God, because we still have a significant amount of ground to cover…”

“Not another word out of me until you have some.”

“You said you were going to be forthcoming. If this is what forthcoming looks like with you, you’re just going to wish you’d gone back to cooperating—”

“Prince. The fragrance of it. _Ambrosial._ Close your eyes and you can just smell the thyme on the hillside, hear the bees humming in it…”

“You bad, _manipulative_ God, you. —Because if you think that I can be thrown off track so easily…”

_“Prince.”_

“…Oh all _right_ , give me the damn glass!” A pause. “Ohh, oh my.”

“Quite.” And another pause. “Mmmm…”

_Did he just make that sound? Yes, he did._

_And wouldn’t you love to hear that sound under some other circumstances? Much closer to you?_ Yes you would.

 _…Now_ stop _that!_

“Yes. Quite. …Now while we’re speaking of Aphrodite…”

***

Five tablets in and the light around them had gone warm with sunset as the fire slowly burned brighter. The Prince had briefly stepped away from the God’s own history, as he seemed to be sensitive about parts of it: and in his turn he too was waiting for the wine to have some effect, for the God was not at all immune to it. He was watching the shadowy form in the chair across from him with some care, remembering how the “old herdsman” had not wanted anything to do with the milk of the poppy, once upon a time: here and now, that could have deeper meaning.

But the God hadn’t by any means been overindulging, and if he was beginning to loosen up and laugh at things now, it surely had as much to do with the subject matter as with the wine. The Prince didn’t find this hard to understand, for picking the pockets of the Gods’ own Trickster— _repeatedly_ —was not exactly beginner’s work.

“…Entirely his fault, though. He should know better than to have pockets in his kilts. If he’d stuck to belt pouches I’d have had a lot more trouble. And he should know that better than most.”

The Prince was wiping his eyes after yet another bout of laughter. “It just seems strange,” he said. “Everyone tends to think of him these days as so distinguished and upright, so stable. The pathfinder, the helper of heroes. Such a… I don’t know. A team player.”

“Maybe now. But he didn’t start that way. The story’s not as widespread as it might be; no surprise, there was so much spin after the fact. The goddess Maia bore Hermes about nine in the morning, and by sunset he’d already gone out and stolen the cattle of the Sun. What’s more, Apollo had no idea who’d done it, or even _how_.”

The Prince whistled. “Thought Apollo was supposed to be able to see everything, from that vantage point…”

“He thought so too.” The God was amused. “Apparently not. No one was clear that the adorable newborn baby was also the adorable newborn Prince of Thieves. Maia fed him and put him down for a nap and the baby got right out of the cradle and sneaked out of the house to go start investigating the world. He could already move instantly to anyplace he wanted to, so within an hour or two he’d stumbled onto the Sun’s private island. Took a shine to the pretty golden-horned cattle… and, well, no sooner seen than rustled.” The God chuckled. “He fouled up the forensics by tying leafy branches around his feet to conceal the shape of his little footprints, and then purposely drove the cattle backwards into a cave where he hid them. When Apollo saw the tracks he didn’t know what on Earth to make of them. But he _is_ the God of prophetic knowledge, so as soon as he applied his power to the problem and discovered who was responsible, he went straight off to Maia’s. And what does he find there but the poor innocent baby sleeping in the cradle, looking like butter wouldn’t melt.”

“’Butter?’”

“It’s like oil but solid. They use it on bread in the Northlands.”

“Oh. Well…” The Prince laughed over his wine. “I can see where the God wouldn’t want to have had the news get out. All-seeing Apollo flummoxed by a one-day-old?”

“Massive loss of his credibility, of course,” said the God. “Well, the damage control started more or less immediately. Naturally the Farshooter went straight to Zeus and complained. Zeus stepped in and made the baby give the cows back.”

“What did he even _want_ them for?” the Prince said.

“Maia kept telling everybody it was probably milk.” The Prince spluttered into his wine. “But Zeus knew, and Apollo knew. And I know.” Another smile stirred under those shadows. “The buzz of stealing the unstealable: Hermes was already addicted to that. And wanting appreciation, applause. Not even a day old and already suffering from the frailty of genius: he needed an audience. Well, that he got. The Thunderer understood the dynamic. As soon as the baby was grown—took a few weeks—he enlisted him in law enforcement. Made perfect sense. Want to catch the poachers? Take the best one ever born and make him the gamekeeper. There isn’t a game going that Hermes doesn’t know from the inside.” But from within the shadows the Prince caught a glimpse of quite feral amusement. “However, every now and then someone invents a new one.”

“You.”

“One must stay ahead of the game,” said the God. “And I have a thing or two on _him_. It keeps the playing field level.”

“Tell me!”

“Not today.”

“Oh, you know you want to.”

“Already you know me too well, Prince. Of course I do. But as you say: ‘serial drama…’” And all the shadows in the corners of the sitting-room smiled. There was wickedness in the smile, but it was well outweighed by the warmth.

The Prince shook his head and grinned into his wine. “I’ve created a monster,” he said under his breath. “Let’s move on…”

***

And somewhat later, with darkness fallen outside the windows and the starlight shining in, and only a few lamp-borne tongues of fire left discussing the issues of light and darkness with the quiet blaze in the hearth—still the angular shadow lay stretched out long and relaxed in the right-hand chair, and the glow of firewarmed linen and flame-gilt hair leaned back easy in the left-hand one.

“We really do have to come back to this,” the Prince said, “because the story can’t begin properly without it.” In the chair across from him, underneath the veiling of darkness, eyes rolled while chopsticks dug about in the bottom of a near-empty carton. “I know, I know, it seems like I’m harping on… but I don’t see why you’re so sensitive about it.”

The Prince was on his seventh tablet now, and the evening was well set in outside. The Thalastrae had brought them more Ch’inese, and the Prince was waving half a spring roll for emphasis while the God rooted around for a final nugget or two of crispy-fried _dofu_. “Seriously, Heaven’s well stocked with weird births. Hera had Hephaestus all by herself to get back at Zeus for Athena, and apparently without even swallowing anybody. Aphrodite just sort of congealed out of sea foam. Dionysus wound up sewn up inside Zeus’s side, or thigh, or groin, or someplace, depending on whose translation you’re reading…”

“Inguinal gap, actually.”

“Thank you. But you see what I mean? Eros hatches out of an egg or something—so does Helen of Troy, apparently, not to mention one of her brothers, which must have confused her Mummy and Daddy in Sparta something fierce— So you have no business feeling self-conscious about this. In fact, from the storytelling point of view, the odder the better. After hearing a poem with a really good origin story, people are bending each other’s ears about it for days. ‘Did you hear the one about the new God with the nine mothers? Or maybe ten? Or eleven? You’re never going to believe this, just wait till you hear.’ And it doesn’t hurt a bit that they’re probably the most interesting crowd of Mummies that anybody could have assembled.”

“Yes,” the God said under his breath, amused, “you can just imagine the Winter-Kalend dinners…” He stabbed idly at a last piece of _dofu_ that was eluding him, finally capturing the annoying morsel, eating it, shoving the chopsticks into the carton, and dropping the whole business on the floor.

“So let’s tease it out. The ‘Who’ is established. Or as established as it needs to be. The ‘When’ doesn’t much matter, since in a poem you can be vague about such things, and anyway you explained… well, sort of explained… about nonlinear time.” The Prince finished his spring roll, picked up one of the dish-washing cloths from the kitchen, which had now been renamed a “tea towel” by the God, and rubbed his hands clean; then reached for the tablet and stylus again. “The ‘What’… well, in terms of the intimate details, maybe it’s better to just class it as a Mystery, like what goes on at Eleusis. Not to be spoken of.”

“Please,” said the God, and even beneath the shadow the Prince could catch the eyeroll. “And thank you.”

“Which leaves us with the ‘Where’ and the ‘How’…”

“And the ‘Why’.”

“A bit of a quandary for most people, usually,” the Prince said, “unless you have a direct line to Lady Destiny or the Fates…” Then he looked up. “I keep forgetting where I am. And that you’re not most people, or even most Gods. _Do_ you know?”

The God hesitated. “One thing at a time,” he said. “Or two.” He was silent for a while, gazing into his wine, and the Prince said nothing, just let him rest undisturbed in his own quiet. Over the day he’d discovered that his companion was full of these long silences out of which sudden revelations would arise. Finally the God said, “There was a time… when all the participants were drawn together at the same time to a shadowy place at the foot of Olympus, over on the west side, before dawn. Not far from here, in fact. And in the shadows, they found something.”

The Prince waited.

The God sounded slightly bemused. “…It was a light, Athena said. Down in the darkness they found a light that had driven the shadows away.” He shook his head. “And when they went to the light, it faded as the shadows had, and there was a baby lying there.”

And then he looked up sharply at the Prince as if expecting some kind of mockery.

The Prince simply met the part-seen eyes through their shadows, and shook his head. “But it makes perfect sense,” he said. “It’s what you do. Isn’t it?”

The God gazed back at him, silent. “It _does_ make sense,” the Prince said. “You keep your shadows about you so that when you move among the dark things, they don’t just flee immediately and set up shop somewhere else. You learn them from the _inside_. But that’s always how it has to be done, isn’t it? No one learns how to fight death by avoiding it. You have to go where it is, get in among people trying to do it to each other, stop it from happening. It’s the same with fear. No one learns to beat their fear except by getting inside it, getting to grips with it… then making their way out: fighting their way out, if they have to.”

The Prince looked at his wine, red like blood in the glass; let out a breath, drank, put the glass aside. “So, same thing for you. Try lighting up a shadow from the outside, and as soon as you move away, it comes back. But light a light _inside_ a shadow and it wipes it out; it’s gone, there’s nothing to fear any more…” He looked up with pleasure. “So you were right.”

 _“I_ was right?”

“You _do_ know what you were born for,” the Prince said. “Your birth _said_ it. After that, all you had to do was catch up.”

The God looked at him, opened his mouth… and an immense yawn issued forth.

The Prince burst out laughing. _Seriously, how many times have I laughed today? When in the last few years have I laughed so much when the conversation hasn’t even really been about_ funny _things?_

 _It’s as if I’ve been meant to be here for a long, long time. It would take so very little for all this to become perfect…_ And then the Prince yawned too: he couldn’t help it. And now it was himself he was laughing at, and the God helped him, low and deep, his shadows shaking with it.

“All right,” he said, putting the last tablet up on top of the pile on the nearby table, “that’s a sign. I’m for my couch, and I’ll start getting this in shape in the morning.” But the thought of a moment before had triggered a memory, something he wanted to bring up. He leaned forward, met the God’s eyes through the shadows as his laughter trailed off. “But first… There’s one thing I’d like to do.”

“Name it, Prince.”

“I want to let my family know I’m all right.”

The God straightened in his chair, pulled his shadows about him and said nothing.

The Prince began to sweat a little at that. _Never mind, though: keep it light._ “I mean, think about how you phrased your—what was it you called it? —your ‘press release’ to the oracles. I mean, really. ‘A dark and terrible being whom even the Gods fear?’” And disturbing as the phrasing was, the Prince still found he could laugh at it a little. “Little bit on the dramatic side, you think?”

“Well, they _do_ fear me,” said the Consulting God after a moment.

“Just going by what’s in the cupboards, I’d say they’ve got reason,” said the Prince, and now the amusement wasn’t entirely something he was holding in place on purpose. “But without any further word from me, my family has to be thinking that I’ve been the mains in some monster’s takeaway!”

Again the God said nothing. “I told them when I was leaving that I thought I wasn’t about to die,” the Prince said. “All I want is a chance to let them know I was right.”

The God bowed his head and looked away from the Prince, away from the fire, so there was no seeing anything of his expression at all: and his voice when he spoke was neutral. “Now you’ve surprised me again,” he said. “Do you really need to do this? After what we’ve been through the past couple of days, you’ve not exactly been behindhand in saying that families can be problematic.”

“Yes,” the Prince said. “But not mine. Well, my sister, yes, she qualifies as problematic sometimes. But my mother and father… You _met_ them. And since you were all about reading hearts while you were with us, you’d not have just read mine to see what makes me what I am, would you? Not nearly enough evidence. You’d have read theirs too, to be certain. So you know first-hand that as mortals go, they’re good people.”

The God said nothing again, wouldn’t look at the Prince.

“They’ll be suffering right now,” said the Prince. “They’ll be mourning me, my God.” He swallowed. “Look, I know you’re not comfortable yet telling me everything about why I’m here, and I’m not going to press you. I know you have your reasons, your methods. But I also know that my parents have done _nothing_ to deserve to suffer on my behalf. All I’m asking is to put a word or two in some prophet’s ear, just enough to let them know that I’m still breathing… to tell them I’m well and happy. Surely it’s not too much.”

There was another of those three- or four-breath silences. Finally, “It could be,” the God said, most reluctantly. “This isn’t going to sound sensible to you, Prince. I’m no prophet myself. But Gods have a kind of knowing that comes to them, and this—” He shook his head. “If you do this, you’re opening the door to a danger that will come toward you, and toward me, and toward both of us together. I don’t know its name, I don’t know what shape it will take—”

“Does it matter?” said the Prince. “Because before, you said ‘dangerous’…and here I am.”

The God let out an uncomfortable breath.

“And you’re not even sure about this danger, are you? It’s just a feeling.”

“A God’s feeling, yes… which it’s wise to pay attention to.”

“Then we’ll keep our eyes open, right?” the Prince said. “You’re the Consulting God, after all. Even after so short a time with you, I know what you can do. Surely if anything dangerous really _does_ start happening, you’ll deduce it before it ever gets close, you’ll see it a mile off, and we can stop it! But this—what I want to do—you know this is right, the right thing to do.”

It was a good while before an answer came back. Finally the God lifted his head again and turned back toward the Prince and the fire. “You know I can’t refuse you this,” he said, and though his voice was still uneasy, there was also a warmth in it that stirred a corresponding warmth inside the Prince. “All right. But you can’t be too specific, Prince. This goes back to what we were discussing with Hermes. Until we’re clear that your status here has been given official recognition, you can’t rub other mortals’ noses in the fact that you’re dwelling on Olympus. And messages that go out on the West Wind can sometimes come to the wrong ears. So you have to be cautious, you have to be discreet…”

“But I _can_ send them word—”

“Yes,” said the God. “Yes, of course.”

The Prince grinned with delight and gratitude, and reached out to take the God’s hands in his. “Thank you,” he said. “It was all I needed to make being here perfect.”

“My Prince,” the God said, “that’s all I could desire for you.” And the hands the Prince clasped squeezed his back. It was strange how much restraint there could be in such a gesture: but then this _was_ the Consulting God…

And that reminded the Prince of something else that had been niggling at him to be dealt with. “By the way, since we’re housemates, you _can_ call me Iaon, you know! No need to stand on ceremony.”

The look the God gave him through his darkness was subdued and strange in a way the Prince couldn’t pin down. “But I have no name to give you in return.”

The Prince was about to suggest that he could always call the God by his patronymic, as yearsmates might casually do… but then he remembered that fathers were in short supply in the God’s bloodline. “…Ah,” he said.

“Yes. …But what you’ve been doing already, that’s… that’s quite good.”

The Prince nodded quickly, feeling something uncomfortable and unfinished in the air between them, and wanting it gone. “All right. So I’ll keep doing that, and you do what you’ve been doing with me. Anyway, give it time. Because when you live together, nicknames come up, don’t they? Epithets. They just grow naturally out of the way things happen. That’ll take care of itself. But in the meantime you’ll be ‘my God’, and I’ll be ‘your Prince’, and that’ll be fine. Yes?”

“Yes,” the God said. “It’s all fine.” And the Prince felt that discomfort in the air ebbing away, shadow dissolving in sunlight.

“Good,” he said, squeezing the God’s hands again, then letting them go as he rose. “Is there a case tomorrow?”

“Nothing scheduled,” the God said, “but you’ve seen how it goes. Things can change pretty quickly…”

“Then don’t be up too late,” the Prince said, and smiled, and headed for the stairs. “Good night…”

“Sleep well.”

Behind him as he went upstairs the Prince heard a few soft experimental strokes of the bow across the strings of the God’s bowed lyre; then a low, slow, meditative music that even the closed door of his room couldn’t quite block away, nor did he mind. Shortly he was undressed and stretched out under the warmth of the couch’s soft throw, with fragments of verse for tomorrow’s work already trying themselves out in his mind. _Bios logismos,_ he thought drowsily, laughing at himself one more time, _like the poets’ll ever leave_ that _phrase alone, they’ll hate the way it doesn’t scan in non-local meters. Probably shorten it down to_ blog _or some such. Well, what can you do?_ …And he let the whole issue go, as from downstairs a long downscaling note from the God’s instrument sounded almost as if it was trying to speak a new word, trying to say _Iaonnnn…_

When it resumed, it took very little time for the music to escort him seamlessly into a warm and shadowy landscape where there were bees humming, and a quiet voice, dark, deep, echoing the hum, breathing softly in his ear. The Prince turned over and slept deep, gladly now hunting one of his dreams down the corridors of sleep rather than being hunted by it; and all unknowing, he smiled in the darkness when he caught this one at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please visit the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) for update schedules, maps, illustrations, random musings, background information, and other ephemera.


	18. Of the Days That Followed in the House, and Some Moments From Them

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The Healer-Prince finishes settling in and then discovers he's got a big problem with his divine housemate: the Consulting God realizes he's got a big problem concerning his blogger, and starts hunting the solution._
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> (Warnings for nights down the pub, crap telly (or actually τέλε-), occasional crap weather, secret messages, mortal angst, an uncredited appearance by a cranky squid, and (romantic) Necessity as the mother of Invention. Oh, and what a surprise: BEES.)

So it came to pass the next morning—in the hour just before dawn, when dreams come that are true—that a prophetess of the great temple of Apollo at Bassae south of Mycenae was startled from her sleep in her little house under the olive trees by words from an ancient poem that recited themselves insistently over and over in her mind. As she dressed herself and made her way to the nearby cottage where the senior priest of Apollo stayed, she could also hear whispering in her ear, again and again, the names of the people for whom the lines were meant. Within the hour the words of the verse fragment had been written down on thin-scraped vellum and given into the care of a messenger pigeon.

An hour or so later, Mikaion Lithopouridês came hurrying up the steps to the royal chambers in a distant Palace, and pressed an utterly unexpected message-capsule into the hands of King Dososarchos. He and Queen Ianeira thanked the priest, dismissed him, and withdrew to their private chambers. Miki didn’t linger: to do so would have suggested that he expected some reaction that would have been out of the ordinary. And when they came out again to set about the Kingdom’s business, the faces of the King and Queen wore the same stoically sorrowful looks they had worn for days. But they were royalty of the old school, and well used to keeping their faces from betraying the business of their hearts—whether that was a weight of grief like a mountain bearing them down, or a sudden upsurge of joy like sweet spring water bursting miraculously through the stone of the mountainside.

News of this came back to the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees before very long, for in its travels the West Wind sees as well as hears, and can fetch back not merely words but also images to those whose needs it serves. And the Prince, nodding a little sadly (but still with relief) at what he saw in the small dark rectangular mirror where the Wind displayed such imagery, then turned his attention to other things. He was applying himself now to learning the business of the House, and what living there meant, as well as learning the business of the Consulting God and becoming a full partner in it.

It was complicated. The old saying is, “Come live with me and you’ll know me.” In settling into life with the Consulting God, the Prince quickly realized that the mind inside that shadowy exterior was many, many times more remarkable than he’d originally suspected or been shown. In this regard the words “amazing” and “fantastic” didn’t even begin to cover it, and quickly started to suffer from overuse while alternatives were sought. But the Prince also swiftly came to realize that the God had… _quirks._ Some of them were amusing: some were merely briefly irritating: others were well-nigh unbearable until you got used to them (or even afterwards). But then, since the Prince was already well aware from the words of the poets of how very unusual the personal lives of Gods could be, none of this took him by surprise. And in fact, as he’d often tell himself as he staggered to his couch after some particularly exciting or challenging day, compared to some of the Olympians, his God was relatively manageable. A couple of tendays after his arrival the Prince spent a long evening down near Olympus’s foot at the Taverna of the Slug on the Lettuce—that fabled local where the Gods’ support staff drink—chatting with (among many others) Dionysus’s poor long-suffering PA. The Prince came away from that conversation thanking all the great Powers that gaze down on Olympus from the cloudy void above that he didn’t have to put up with _that_ kind of thing. He might have to be up all night with the God in the cold and the wet lying in wait for a passing murderer, or spending all afternoon with the Thalastrae cleaning the ink of an aggrieved giant cuttlefish off every surface in the kitchen, but others had it much worse.

There could still be numerous major and minor annoyances of all kinds in any given day, for the Consulting God not only could be infuriating, but didn’t _care_ that he could. When the Work was obsessing him most powerfully, the God’s casual thoughtlessness annoyed the Prince nearly as much as his frequent claim to have no heart—which was obviously complete rubbish, and which the God simply used as an excuse to be casually snappish and astonishingly rude to everyone around him. In such uncaring moods he’d send all the Thalastrae off on errands, and then, either forgetting that he’d done so, or simply not caring, he’d start shouting for things. Then the Prince would wind up getting up to hand the God styli that were sitting right on the desk next to him, or bringing him tea when he was perfectly capable of getting it himself. Even the tea itself turned into an issue (rather to the Prince’s surprise, since he’d after all just invented drinking it). The God had a bit of a sweet tooth, but it was impossible to judge how much of one: it seemed to change daily. “Not sweet enough!” would be the response to one serving, and “Too much honey!” to another. Or _“Two_ honeys, Prince, what part of ‘two’ didn’t you understand?” But the size of the “two” seemed to vary constantly, and this made the Prince—who from his work in compounding drugs was used to dealing with exact amounts, right down to fractions of a scruple—extremely crazy.

But what got far more seriously under the Prince’s skin was that the God didn’t even spare _himself_ his own thoughtlessness. When immersed in the complications of a case, or in the midst of one of his never-ending series of experiments, he would neglect himself shockingly. He would forget to eat or drink, and would try hard not to sleep—and though in some regards, especially when case-driven, the God was unquestionably superhuman in this regard, he could also simply be stupid about it, because “sleeping was boring”. Worse, the details of some cases sometimes distracted him so completely that the God would rush out somewhere without his cloak, using West Wind to handle the transport… and those, without fail, would be the times the weather would suddenly turn.

The Prince soon found that the Thalastrae had been right on the money, meteorologically speaking. Though the Gods’ presence there tends to warp the weather systems around it somewhat, Olympus still gets occasional spates of chill rain and sleet in the summertime, and brief unpredictable snowstorms all the rest of the year. Caught out in one of these, or in unreliable weather elsewhere, the Consulting God would get himself soaking wet while ferreting out some obscure clue on Earth or in Heaven, and come home chilled to his godly bones. And then, since Gods are by no means invulnerable either to wounding or to the minor ills of the body, and since he’d also usually been failing to eat or sleep properly for days beforehand, he’d come straight down with a too-typical upper-respiratory rheum and lie around feverish and moaning and coughing his lungs up for days, inevitably complaining all the more bitterly as he got better. Only this infallible indicator of the God’s returning health came between the Prince and the recurring temptation to brain his divine housemate with the teapot. But regardless of his relief, at such times the Prince’s life closely resembled a little patch of Erebus, and often enough he caught himself swearing not to even _speak_ to the bloody God again until he started taking better care of himself, and ideally behaving a lot better as well.

Yet these fits of bad temper never lasted; the Prince always found he simply couldn’t hold on to them even when he wanted to. Amid the casework and all the other craziness, without warning and seemingly without reason his companion would do him some sudden kindness—a delivery of temple-sourced farmhouse preserves from the Kingdom, for which the God had deduced that the Prince was feeling a bit homesick; or perhaps an unscheduled journey via the Shadowcloak to some faraway place that the Prince had offhandedly mentioned he’d always been curious to see. And then at the Prince’s reaction to the sight of some fabulously far-off mountain landscape, or a slice of soft-baked flatbread covered with sharp quince jam, that smile the Prince could just barely see through the shadows always wrapping his God—the smile that warmed him right through—would be turned on the Prince and held there until he could practically feel it on his skin, like the sun.

Nor did the Prince’s growing tolerance of his companion’s less appropriate behaviors have anything to do with such occasional gifts or indulgences. He was beginning to see the point of the Work’s relentless demands, in his own way, as the God might see it; how its ruthless insistence on maximum speed and elegance of execution served both the Work itself, and those whom It in Its turn served. He began to understand how even a God may have a God of his own, one for whom everything was to be sacrificed—regardless of how he might deny it. Of course the Consulting God would snort with derision when the Prince suggested that his colleague was himself in service to a higher power, namely Justice, who sat enthroned in her majesty above both gods and men. “Oh, Prince, how _idiotic,”_ the God would mutter, dripping scorn, as they tensely crouched together in some noisome, murky alley waiting for some careless malefactor, or combed through some smelly midden for the single discarded clue that would make a whole case clear. “The case itself, the truth itself, getting it _right_ , being right _first_ , shouldn’t that be _enough?_ Don’t try to make some sort of altruistic hero of me, Prince: I’m no such thing.”

But routine accusations aside, the Prince was never idiot enough to believe that his colleague was being entirely honest about this, or to take his denials seriously. He was gradually coming to know that the Consulting God had his own secret loyalties and private sensitivities that not even one so close to him was expected to expose or explore. Even admitting them would somehow be like an admission of failure… and the Consulting God did not do failure.

But as regarded the God’s unswerving commitment to the Work, that the Prince could understand from the inside. As a healer he knew how insistent and emotionally demanding a deeply-felt vocation could be: the anguish that came with losing someone’s life or limb, the triumph that came with saving them. So when the God was under stress to produce a result—which, when cases were afoot, was always—the Prince concentrated on staying steady, keeping calm, being a solid presence the God knew he could fall back on for support or certainty when he stood in need of them. Not that the God would ever _admit_ as much, of course. But that hardly mattered to the Prince. No healer in his right mind waited for a bleeding man to _admit_ that a wound hurt like hell and needed seeing to. You did what was required right then, and sorted out the thank-yous later… assuming that was even necessary.

Mostly it wasn’t. To be where he was, the Prince realized, was to be thanked, whether the God was doing it actively or not. For both in the cases and out of them he was constantly plunged into unexpected glories and casual marvels, truly astonishing events: and these so far outweighed the frustrations or casual drudgeries that came with day-to-day life with the God that the Prince often felt ashamed of himself for dwelling on them. He had plenty of time and opportunity to get into long idle conversations with the Head that lived in the Cupboard That Was Cold, and other prolonged conversations (of a more dryly philosophical or psychological nature) with the sagacious if frequently unintelligible Skull. He could go downstairs to sit in Mrs. Hudson’s flat and eat her baking—which due to her light, cool hand with pastry was of a very high calibre for anyone, mortal or goddess—along with the fruit preserves from home, and listen to her casual gossip about both commonplace and unbelievable things; immortality and its problems, marriage to abusive deities and how to solve it (in her case not only the God but also his Godparents and a one-way ticket to Tartarus had been involved), the virtues of currants versus raisins in scones, and the sorrows and scandals of the minor-Goddess community.

Or else the Prince might catch a glimpse of wide blue-white wings circling high up around Olympus’s peak, and then he’d shout “Off out!” to Mrs. Hudson and hurriedly make his way over to the stables on the far side of the mountain, where Pegasus would be making one of his periodic solo visits to shake down the grooms for the wine-soaked mash they fed the immortals’ horses. There the Prince would spend the best part of the afternoon discussing the care and feeding of flying equines with the stablehands, while the equine in question whuffled in his hair and cribbed at his clothes and pestered the Prince for treats. (Bellerophon had finally awakened, but was still in the early stages of a long recovery, and Pegasus seemed to have decided that the Prince sometimes made an acceptable temporary substitute.) And on the way home—unless the God came to fetch him because a new case was just breaking—the Prince might even stop in to pick up a few things from that place that few mortals ever have seen: the veritable Tesko of the Gods, as is told of in song and story in the distant Northlands and far beyond. In that wondrous place there are always enough checkouts open. There the chip-and-PIN machines have been tweaked by Hephaestus himself and therefore give you no lip; the aisle staff always know where things actually are instead of where they should be in theory; nothing is ever shelved out of reach, no matter what your height. And on the shelves in that place there is always ample stock of that divine confection, Tiptree’s Little Scarlet, the rare and delectable jam made of the tiny strawberry that grows only down near where the spring rises on Olympus’s south slope (or at least it does if you can keep certain winged horses away from it when it’s fruiting).

In fact the Prince got to see quite a lot of the Tesko, for once the God started taking milk in his tea (and in this matter as in so many others the Prince swiftly followed him), they seemed to go through it at a shocking rate. At least they always seemed to be out of it when the Prince opened the Cupboard That Was Cold and wanted some himself. (He’d asked the Head whether it minded if he put the milk in there, and the Head’s response had been, “Go right ahead. At least it’s something to talk to.”) As the God seemed constitutionally unable to inform one of the Thalastrae when he was using up the last of the milk, the Prince briefly considered getting a cow… but the God instantly vetoed this on the grounds that it would wreak havoc with the rosebushes and (much more importantly) upset the Bees. The Prince, therefore, seemed to wind up at the Tesko on a near-daily basis, to the point where the cool demure female voices of the chip-and-PIN machines got to know him so well that they first went a bit sultry and then actually started coming on to him. _And is it a sign I’m becoming strange,_ the Prince thought, as with half a smile as he lugged out yet another couple of jugs of the milk in those dreadful little thin bags with the handles that cut into your hands, _that I’m finding that a bit flattering?_

But quickly he found the uncommon becoming commonplace to him, and the routine-that-wasn’t-a-routine turning into so normal-seeming a way of life that the Prince found it hard to imagine any other. All of a long day—or two or three—might be taken up somewhere in the realm of Earth with desperate hunts for clues, pursuits of shadowy beings or downright evil ones both mortal and immortal, chases through enchanting or terrifying landscapes, encounters with the surreal or the deadly. But sooner or later the black door of the House would open before the God and the Prince, and they would head up those stairs in company, weary but satisfied.

If the case had been a prolonged one, the God would usually wind up staggering down to his room to sleep the two-day sleep of a very exhausted deity. If it had been a bit shorter, he might just flop down on the sitting room couch and lie there lost in recuperative contemplation, imitating what would probably someday be his own statue—stretched out, eyes closed, the long hands pressed together and the fingers laid against his lips or just under his chin. (It occurred to the Prince within moments of imagining this statue that when the God _did_ eventually have temples, he’d probably wind up being terribly annoyed with his worshippers most of the time… because if they tried emulating this position to worship him via deduction, most of them would probably fall asleep instead. The thought of cool marble temples full of wall-to-wall snoring devotees, and the annoyed God sending endless excoriatory texts to his unfortunate priests to “wake those people _up_ for Gods’ sake, what possible _use_ are they like that?”, made the Prince start snorting so hard with laughter that he had to go straight out and spend nearly an hour pretending to be doing something about the bins.)

But sometimes the God and the Prince had enough energy left at the end of a long hard case to simply unwind. Sometimes they’d sit up late together on the couch and laugh at the pictures of the world that West Wind somehow brought to the little dark rectangular mirror on the far side of the flat. The God would shout unlikely suggestions and annoyed opinions at the doings of the clueless mortals they watched, while stealing the last of the Prince’s steamed dumplings between times, and the Prince would make off with the God’s fried noodles in revenge (having in self-defense very quickly become a virtuoso in the art of the eating-sticks of Ch’in). At such times, in the cozy quiet of the sitting room, with the fire burning warm between their two chairs and the shadows chuckling softly in the corners, how the God might possibly misbehave tomorrow was of no importance to the Prince at all. The place where the two of them were right now, and who they were together—the excitement and the danger and the humor of their partnership, the closeness and the comfort of it—outweighed any possible ructions the morrow might bring.

And then, when things quieted down a little bit after a case, there was always the business of the actual telling of the tales of the Consulting God’s cases and deductions. The strange new compound word _biologismos_ or its slightly-barbaric contraction _blog_ began to appear and spread in the languages men spoke in the Greeklands in those days, as the Prince wrote the stories of the cases and handed them off to the West Wind to disseminate. From that time came some of the best of the stories of the deeds of the Consulting God—such tales as the Case of the Gleek Interpreter, and the Adventure of the Dog That Did Nowt in the Night-Time, and the Secret of the Crutch of Electrum. From these came what the poets started to recognize as repeating tropes: Hermes on the doorstep (or suddenly in the sitting room) shouting “Will you come?”, or a text from some God or (forwarded) from some God’s priest, that appeared shining in the middle of the air while the Consulting God and his princely companion were in the midst of talking through the details of some mystery, or cleaning up after some experiment gone very, very wrong. An excursion via the outwhirled Shadowcloak would follow; then the examination of a mysterious and not-immediately-explicable crime scene, the interrogation of unwilling or bereaved or slyly obstructive witnesses, the God talking it through all the while with his faithful colleague. And at the end, usually, would come a final and frequently very physical confrontation in some scary venue where the Consulting God and his warrior-Healer struggled with the malefactor(s) and finally brought them low, to the bafflement of the Yarders and the (sometimes grudging) admiration of all.

The God looked over these early works and critiqued them severely. “What kind of title is _that?”_ he’d mutter, peering over the Prince’s shoulder as he carefully scribed the wax. “‘The Adventure of the Beryl Necklace?’ It’s not about the necklace at _all,_ Prince, it’s all about Harmonia and—” “Yes,” the Prince would say, patiently and slowly scribing his letters—he wasn’t a fast writer, but he was fanatical about getting every letter right— “but you’re just saying that because when they were chasing us, _you_ got cocky and nearly dropped the necklace in bloody _Phlegethon—!”_ And so it would go. The God would complain to his blogger about his sentence structure and correct his scansion, and the blogger would smile and nod and correct it right back when the God wasn’t looking, because the God’s inflections were routinely far too posh for the Prince’s intended audience. And typically, no sooner would the Prince have peeled the words off the wax and tossed them out the House’s front window to the passing West Wind than the Messenger of the Gods would appear in their sitting room again, or else Mrs. Hudson would call up the stairs, “Boys, _we’ve got another one!”_ —and in a swirl of shared shadow the God and the Prince would once more be gone.

Such was the structure of the new routine that became established for the Prince in the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees. But there were moments during this period that particularly stood out in the Prince’s mind, and two of them in particular were closely associated.

***

The solution of the Case of the Electrum Crutch should, the Prince thought, have been enough to satisfy even the God. It was quick, it was unusually clever, it involved a flurry of on-the-fly deduction that made even Hermes look closely at the God to see if he was making some of this up, and at the end there was a satisfying late-night chase and fight and capture that left both deity and mortal sweating with the pursuit and its resolution, and flushed with triumph and the elation of closely-shared effort. But the Prince was astonished to find when they got back to the House of the Two Hundred Twenty-One Bees the next afternoon (the debrief at the Yard took a while) that after the fact the God was not at all happy with the day’s result, and immediately began pacing up and down the sitting room with his shadows whipping and writhing around him as if caught in their own private windstorm.

Already having seen this mood descend once or twice, the Prince now knew what to do about it. He grabbed a clean tablet frame from the pile on the table near his chair—the Thalastrae now made sure there was always a supply of them there—then sat down and started making notes on the previous evening’s doings. And perhaps half an hour later the God finally held still in front of the fire, and stood gazing down at the left-hand chair and the mortal in it, who was still calmly making notes.

“They got far too close to you that time, my Prince,” the God said. _“That_ got far too close to you.”

The Prince finished a line on the tablet, then laughed. “Didn’t help it much at the end,” he said. “But anyway, sometimes you have to get in close. That’s why I keep my sword so sharp.”

“I don’t care. It’s not to be tolerated,” the God said, and in his voice was something the Prince couldn’t remember having heard before in the aftermath of a case: not just anger, but a slight edge of fear. The Prince heard the God dispensing anger all the time, but it was almost always meant for other people; since he was usually close by when the God started pouring scorn on things, he’d learned not to take it personally if he got a bit splashed. This, though, struck him as different, and a touch worrying. He put the stylus down and leaned back in his chair, watching the God’s pacing start up again.

“We need to find a solution to this,” the God was muttering. “I can’t always be around to smite these people when they suddenly get you outnumbered or outmatched.”

“Don’t you think you might be overreacting a little? I’m usually able to take care of myself…”

“Today wasn’t ‘usually’, Prince! If that amphisboena had once got its teeth into you, that would have been—”

“A bit not good,” the Prince admitted: but he kept any significant concern out of his tone.

“Well beyond a bit.” The God broke off his pacing again to stand staring into the fire. “We’ve got to find you a longer-distance solution than your sword. Or any spear, either.”

“Well, unless you can smuggle me out a thunderbolt from the workshop up the way—”

A pause, and then a low dark chuckle—still edged with discomfort, but at least now the humor was back. “It’s always you and the thunderbolts, isn’t it.” Yet the shadows lashing around the God were still storm-black with the frown the Prince couldn’t see. “You know only Zeus can use those…”

“Thought you stole one once.”

“So I did,” the God said, “and being barely a week old was the only thing that got me off. If I could do that for you, I’d have done it already.”

The Prince shrugged. “I could always start carrying a bow again, I suppose.”

“No,” the God said. “Too awkward, too slow, too vulnerable to weather conditions, takes too long to get ready.” The scowl was manifesting itself even more powerfully through the shadows, if that was possible. “You ought to have a weapon that’s both easy to carry and still has some kind of reach. One with some knockdown power, one that’s ready as soon as you bring it out….” He was pacing completely wrapped in a far deeper darkness than usual, not even the glint of eyes showing through it: they were squeezed shut in intense concentration. “This is something that’s been missing all along. How could I not have deduced it until now? We need something that will use some kind of—”

He froze where he stood.

And then without another word the Consulting God plunged over toward the hook where the Shadowcloak hung, flung it about him, and vanished.

The Prince was left sitting there blinking, though not in surprise. This had happened any number of times since he’d come. Some sudden flash of inspiration would strike the God, and he’d simply disappear and not return for hours, or in extreme cases, a day or two. Sometimes these excursions produced no result that the Prince could see, and explanations were rarely forthcoming. He’d learned to take them in his stride.

For such times he’d developed a set of routines for himself—things that were easier or more comfortable to do when the God wasn’t home than when he was there observing (and sometimes commenting, often scathingly) on everything. Before they’d become caught up in this last case, for example, in company with the Thalastrae the Prince had “done the cupboards,” moving any experiments that were becoming too rambunctious to the storage areas down at the furthest end of the kitchen that he was trying (with mixed success) to get the God to recognize as the proper place for decomposing tissue and other things better kept far away from food.

After that came a job better suited to being done by the Prince alone. As regarded physical impedimenta that were not clues, the God was of an amazingly untidy mind: things that didn’t matter to an investigation any more just got dropped and left where they were, and sometimes couldn’t be found again short of calling in Apollo to do a divinatory consult. While the Thalastrae did an excellent job of keeping the joint living areas tidy, after many excessively noisy outbursts by the God they’d become understandably wary of moving parchments and other materials that the God seemed to be working on.

The Prince, though, had a lot less trouble with the God’s noise in this regard, having been jointly trained by his mother and (in his young-soldier days) his military commanders to be far more tidy, and additionally being more than willing to shout right back at his messy housemate when the clutter got out of hand. So fairly quickly the Prince had taken on the job of stacking and ordering the documentation as best he could, trying to keep associated materials together while still leaving things not too far from where the God had abandoned them. That work, though, didn’t need doing today. The Prince had taken care of it just before their departure to deal with the matter of a lost Phoenician codex, the nasty trained amphisboena, and the mysterious symbol-graven crutch: and they hadn’t been home anything like long enough for the God to have time to mess up the sitting room again.

“All right,” the Prince said to himself, “an outside day, then.” This was much lighter duty (as it also did not involve deciphering the small sticky-parchments containing the God’s handwriting, which was utterly pants due to his hardly ever communicating graphically any way but by text). The Prince would walk the bounds of the House’s little property, enjoy the sweeping views, make sure Mrs. Hudson’s bins hadn’t been tampered with, and then sit out front in the sun for a while and enjoy the quiet while considering how to write up the latest case. And after that maybe he’d go see Mrs. Hudson and bring her up to date on the most recent developments. The Prince’s mouth watered a little at the prospect, for he knew she was baking again that day, and he’d won her over to the concept of putting more currants in the scones this time.

The Prince made his way downstairs and out the front door, and stood there for a moment as it closed behind him, simply enjoying the warm sunshine. The summer was on the point of giving way to autumn, and the sunlight was just beginning to acquire that softer, mellower quality that came with the change of angle as Apollo began working the chariot closer to this hemisphere’s horizon. The roses glowed in the warm afternoon light, and the sky past the end of the garden, where Olympus’s slopes dropped off abruptly toward the mortal world, had shifted from that hot harsh pure blue of midsummer to something just a touch gentler. The day was windless; the silence was near-absolute except for a sporadic soft humming all around him, the sound of the House’s small guardians out about their business.

The Prince sighed and smiled and sat down on the sunny doorstep, both making a decision and giving way to habit. He’d come to take seriously the God’s warning that quiet moments in the life they shared were rare. But also, after the business with Hermes that one time, the Prince had started thinking it’d be smart to let the Bees get more used to him. Partly this came of the old tradition the Palace’s beekeepers had taught him, that you must not try to keep bees as if they were dumb livestock, or just another farming tool. You must engage with them, tell them what’s going on with you and the world around you. So the Prince had begun to do, casually, as the God did it… and if he occasionally told them things he didn’t tell the God, well, not all secrets are for all ears.

The habit had settled itself in pretty quickly for him as part of his routine. If the weather was good, and the God was busy or offsite, the Prince would sit out there on the doorstep to give the Bees the chance to become better acquainted. And soon the Bees had started returning the courtesy. They’d been shy about it at first, two or three or five coming together to land by him on the white stone of the stoop, and they would bask there briefly by him in the morning or afternoon warmth and gaze at him with their little oval eyes. Sometimes the Sun would catch those eyes and glint from them as if from minuscule facets, like jewels, and at such times the Prince often thought he caught there a glimpse of some kind of intelligence he didn’t understand. Around here that hardly seemed strange.

Not far from the doorstep, in among the roses but close to the House, was something the Prince had missed in the rush and excitement of his first arrival. It was a little fountain made of an old worn-down millstone, set into the ground a couple of cubits away from the stoop. From the stone’s central hole, cool water came gently bubbling out, almost silently, and ran down the millstone’s grooves and sides into the short turf around it. To that millstone, late in the day, the Bees would come to drink. When the Prince was sitting there at such a time he’d watch them come and go, all orderly, two or three at a time: flying over from the hive, alighting on the stone, and putting their little mouths down to sip at the clear water as it flowed along the old smooth grooves. Occasionally one of them would get into difficulties after being knocked off balance by the flowing water, unable to easily fly out again because its wings had got wet. Then the Prince would reach in with a careful finger and let the Bee cling onto it with its feet, so that it could right itself and wave its wings in the hot dry air until they were put to rights again, and then fly off.

Now, hearing a slightly louder-than-usual humming somewhere nearby, he glanced over to the stone to see if the “drinks run” had started early, or somebody had dropped by off-schedule for a quick one and got into trouble. But the millstone was barren of any clientele. The Prince shrugged and went back to gazing aimlessly down the garden path again, his mind drifting back to the God’s earlier attitude. _It really_ was _a little close with the amphisboena,_ he thought. _I guess he might have had a point there. But we got through it. And if we’re going to do the more active part of this Work together, there are always going to be close calls. The world we work in is a battlefield, after all. Nothing for it but to keep alert, stay in training as much as possible, take things as they come…_

The humming really was considerably louder than usual. The Prince looked around again, trying to localize it. After a moment, as the sound seemed to be coming from more in front of him, the Prince looked down the white stone path. Against its brightness, he could just make out a group of small dark purposeful shapes making their way slowly along the air toward him. He squinted a little into the brightness to see what they were.

And then he stood up on the doorstep, and slowly dropped to one knee: because, amidst a little bodyguard of her picked warriors, the Queen was coming to see him. In the mortal world such a thing would have been impossible, as mortal Queens once hived do not fly. But plainly here the rules were different.

She landed on his shoulder with her armed guard about her, all weapons sheathed. She seemed to the Prince small-winged for her size (which was nearly that of his thumb), but as an immortal, like Pegasus, this didn’t seem to be a problem for her as far as flight went. In any case he’d often enough seen quite mortal bees doing things that should theoretically have been impossible for creatures of their size. _Perhaps,_ he thought, _as beings who go back and forth between Earth and Heaven on the Gods’ business, they just like making a mockery of physical law every now and then._ But he had no more time to spend on that conjecture, for the Queen now climbed to the collar of the Prince’s tunic, took hold there just under his ear, and buzzed.

The Prince gathered that he had been given permission to be seated in the presence of royalty. Carefully and slowly he sat, and for a while the Queen just clung there, fanning her wings gently and scenting him. The Prince tilted his head a bit to that side and breathed quietly, catching from her the faintest fragrance of honey and roses and wax and the south wind; of constant childbirth—or what a human could make of a bee’s version of it—and never-ending work, and the utter necessity of defending the family and its beloved Home.

For his part he held quite still, letting her make what she could of him, whatever that might be _. For these days, how do I even define it? Prince, yes, for whatever that matters here: not very much. One mortal’s much like another to a God._ And to this God in particular, he was… _Well,_ _colleague, yes; warrior, healer, blogger, friend… all those, for certain._ Yet not too long ago the Prince had told the Bees, quite softly, when the God was safely offsite, that he was wondering whether there might not yet, between the two of them, be something more.

The thought had crept up on him one evening while he and the God had been sitting by the fire and (as usual) talking about anything and everything in the world; for they’d quickly learned that nothing less than the world entire would do as grist for the mill of their joint curiosity—the doings of mortals and gods, their misdeeds and follies, their too-occasional successes and triumphs. Somewhere along the line the Consulting God started telling the Prince about something secret and naughty he’d deduced about the quietest of the Graces just that morning. The Prince snorted in delighted wonder as the deductive chain was laid out for him, and told the God how fantastic it was; and the God genially mocked him for already having expressed that sentiment in every form known to the Greek language, and then amid their shared laughter they sent out for the choice viands of Ch’in, while the Prince got up to make more tea. Much, much later, when conversation had comfortably run its course, the Prince sat there half-drowsing in the left-hand chair by the fire, listening to the sweet dark music that the shadowy shape across from him was drawing from his bowed lyre, and it seemed that it was simply impossible for him to be any happier.

That was when it had come to him that, perhaps… perhaps there might have been _one_ thing more to bring all to perfection.

He’d blushed at the images that began rising before his mind’s eye then, and had hurriedly turned his thoughts away from them. But they’d returned to surprise the Prince again quite late that night, on his couch, when he’d abruptly awakened in the dark of his room and all the House was quiet. And it wouldn’t have been true to say that he exactly rose up with speed to repel those thoughts and images, either. _Well. The ‘rose up’ part,_ that _happened all right.._. He’d dealt with it in the straightforward manner of a former military man, and with an eye to keeping silence insofar as he could. But sleep hadn’t come at all quickly for him afterwards, and he’d lain awake a good while thinking (as he more than occasionally had before) of what else might lie under that tight-wrapped darkness besides the staggering intelligence, the waspish wit, the dry warm humor, the dark deep voice, the keen pale eyes that saw truth through shadow. The lady Xanthe, the Prince was sure, had been merely a kind of sketch or hint of the underlying reality; and “she” had been beautiful indeed. If there was something to match that inside the shadow, an appearance with a more masculine tang that overlaid the sinewy strength and speed and grace that were obvious even through the darkness…

 _Then you’d be lost,_ said the cool remote back of his mind. _Lost utterly. A mind like that,_ and _beauty? Even mortals who were smart and beautiful were always your weakness. You saw how you were just with Xanthe… and the God was restraining himself while he played that part._

 _But the truth is,_ his heart retorted, _that the beauty’s secondary. You can’t even see his face, you’ve promised not to, and you’re lost anyway. And you know what? You_ love _it. There’s nowhere you’d rather be, and no one you’d rather be with._

And that, for good or ill, was true.

No sooner had he let that truth in than another one crowded in hard on its heels; one that had been silently forming in the background of his life for weeks, so sure of itself that it hadn’t even bothered announcing its presence. Now the Prince couldn’t even work out when he’d started to know that this place, this set of circumstances, this company, that _this_ was what he’d been looking for and waiting for all his life. So unthinkingly and casually, so very naturally he’d fallen into calling his companion “my God” in friendly, even mocking response to the God’s “my Prince”. But now he finally saw that it was _true_. The God who beyond belief was his companion, his confidant, his colleague, his best friend, was also in fact his very _own_ God, the one he’d known since childhood would be along eventually, the one he’d been saving himself for: and this, where his own God lived, was his true home at last.

The realization was shattering. No mere spear through the shoulder, no battlefield full of agonies, could begin to compare to the discovery that a lifetime’s waiting has been fulfilled. It was as well that the God was asleep by now, for had he been awake and the Prince anywhere near him, he’d surely have deduced it before the Prince had the slightest clue what to do with the data. Now he lay there having trouble breathing, with something unbearably jumpy going on in his gut, and he knew, _knew_ what this feeling was. He’d felt it before. He refused to name it to himself, but he also knew that the refusal would not matter in the slightest to the feeling’s presence or absence. Here it was.

 _And dear Gods,_ now _what do I do?_

 _Well, you don’t have to_ do _anything,_ he thought eventually, when he’d calmed a little. _If it’s real, it will last. If it’s not, it will pass. In the meantime, do what you normally do. Just be his friend._ _Whatever he feels or doesn’t feel toward you in terms of… that other feeling… that’s still what he most needs from you. Friendship’s love too, after all._ _And whatever else happens,_ friendship _he returns to you in full._ _How many mortals could dare hope for such a friend?..._

Nonetheless, somewhat later in the soft rosy light of that day’s dawn the Prince had gone outside, as he otherwise did often enough to watch the morning come up over the upper slopes of Olympus, and had quietly unburdened himself to the Bees, whispering to them the word he hardly dared say even to himself. After that the Prince had felt a strange relief probably much like that of poor Midas’s servant after he dug a hole and whispered into it the secret he had nowhere else to tell; and he’d found himself able to go about his business in more or less the normal way. Now, though, many days later, as the Prince thought of that night and its following morning, he found himself blushing all over again at his own presumption. When a God has already given you everything—everything you ever desired in your deepest dreams—how do you ask him for that one thing that had only occurred to you since you came? It simply seemed ungrateful.

 _And there’s already such an ease between us,_ the Prince thought. _Why would you take the chance of breaking that, just for the sake of this ‘one thing more?’_ For like most mortals who live in a world where death and disappointment lurk around every corner, he wasn’t immune to the kind of fear that, when things are going wonderfully well, will creep up and whisper itself in your ear: _Now something’s going to go wrong, and you’ll lose it all._ For his own part, that kind of loss wouldn’t have surprised him: it had happened to him before. But that such a thing should happen to the _God_ through him… that was intolerable, something that should never be allowed. Better to stay silent and let life be what it was… which was already extraordinary, quite extraordinary enough.

…The Prince found that he was leaning a bit forward, his elbows on his knees, his fingers laced together, a little white about the knuckles: his hands had been tight-clenched for some moments, striving against each other as his thoughts had been. “Actually, what I said before,” the Prince whispered to the little ebony-and-golden creature clinging to his collar. “The last time. You know what? Ignore me.”

The wings slowly stopped fanning, as if their owner had been surprised by something.

“Just ignore all of what I said then,” the Prince said under his breath. “It was the… I don’t even know _what_ it was that was talking, before. But everything’s just fine as it is. Just so long as he’s, you know… As long as he’s happy; because he mustn’t be hurt. It’s the one chance I don’t dare take. I mean, I’m mortal, I’ve had enough pain in my time, I know what to do with it and I can find my way through. But he doesn’t know what to do with it, really. You see how he gets when it comes his way. So forget all that, about me and him. I can manage. Just as we are, he and I, we’re just… Just fine. It’s all fine.”

And the Prince breathed out, feeling bizarrely both heartsore and at peace, feeling unburdened all over again. He straightened his back a bit and went back to gazing down the garden, into the warm golden light and the slowly lengthening shadows.

He wasn’t sure when the realization began to creep up on him that there had been some kind of change in the sound of the garden around him. The Prince blinked as he realized the cause of it. No bee was flying anywhere now. All had gone quiet and still with the stilling of the wings under his ear. But now those wings slowly started working again: a slowly building hum, soft, and on a deeper note than before, and somehow stronger, too. From all around the garden other wings started picking up that hum, that particular note, repeating it back to one another, until a hundred small voices were singing it, more than a hundred, two hundred certainly, maybe even another twenty, who knew, and under the Prince’s ear, one voice in particular, the one whose thought all the others were speaking, whose word they were singing. It wasn’t all that loud a sound, but it was focused and rich with intent, and the hum of it got into the Prince’s ears and seemed for a moment to shut out all other sound. The feeling grew in him that if he could only understand that sound, he’d be close to the heart of some great mystery. _But I have_ no _idea what it means…_

Very gradually the humming around him started to fade until the sound in the garden had gone back to normal again, the many independent small hums once more moving about, making their way from flower to flower or back and forth from the hive. In that resumed quiet the Prince somehow gathered from the little shape who was still holding onto his collar that she approved—though of what, he had no idea whatsoever—and was finished for the moment; and that he was dismissed.

Carefully the Prince stood, holding himself as straight as any soldier obedient to royalty’s command, while the Queen’s wingbeats came up to a louder and more everyday drone under his ear, as did those of her honor guard. Then off they went, drifting away down the garden again to where the hive was placed today (the Thalastrae moved it at intervals). The Prince stood there waiting until they’d vanished back inside before shaking his head, smiling in bemusement, and turning away. _I’ve had a lot of interesting things happen to me lately,_ he thought, _but that._ That—!

It was the kind of event he’d normally have asked the God about. But doing that would have also involved telling the God what had brought it on, what the Prince had said… and trying to avoid telling him would be useless: the God would deduce his way through to the truth one way or another, and there’d be discomfort and embarrassment all around. _So better not,_ the Prince thought. _Just keep it to yourself, and let it be some strange thing that hasn’t been explained. Gods know there are more than enough of those around here as it is…_

Musing, the Prince went off around the House to finish his examination of the grounds and make sure that the Bins were all right. Then he went back in, and halfway up the stairs was astonished by a sudden sharp violent noise from upstairs, as if a small lightning strike had happened in the kitchen.

It hit him that such an event was not beyond probability. Alarmed, the Prince ran the rest of the way up the stairs and through the sitting room, turned toward the kitchen door… then stopped, his mouth open.

Something black and crusted-looking was sitting in a crucible on the table, smoking gently. Something tall and dark and surprised was leaning nearby, also smoking gently, though a touch less so. And all around, the air stank of brimstone. “What in the _world—!”_ said the Prince to the God. “What _happened?”_

“It’s an experiment, Prince,” the God said.

If so, it was an experiment that had dusted all the God’s front-facing shadows with pale ash and left him shoved up against the counter by the sink, looking more than a little wobbly. “Are you all right?” said the Prince, going to him and putting out a hand to his shoulder to brace him a little. “You look like you need to sit down.”

“No,” the God said, straightening and brushing himself off, “I’m fine. Don’t pay any attention to this, it’s nothing to be concerned about…”

The Prince had his own thoughts about that; but no more information was forthcoming. For the moment he simply helped a little with the brushing-off, and then (as the God disappeared back toward his room) looked after him thoughtfully as he boiled the kettle for tea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this chapter can be found [here](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/30581209697/chapter-19-notes-and-links) at the [Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com).


	19. Of a Gift from the God and How the Prince Received It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _A string of the Consulting God's experiments reaches its desired conclusion, thereupon producing some unexpected results._
> 
> (Warnings for busted dishes, materials technology, the birth of weapons discipline, extreme produce abuse, gratuitous field-stripping, and certain matters finally coming to [ahem] a head.)

The Prince learned nothing further about the matter for several tendays more, as the noises from the kitchen kept getting louder, and the God kept insisting both that there was nothing wrong and that the Prince needed to stay out while he was working. But then—in the interstices between some very intense periods of casework—came some kind of turning point. Gradually the noises started getting, not larger, but _smaller_ : and strangely, this seemed to be making the God more and more excited. At last there came a day when after another of those small, sharp popping noises, the Prince ventured into the kitchen—instructions to the contrary be damned—and said to the God, who once again was leaning up against the counter and panting, “Are you sure you don’t need to sit down?”

And to his surprise, the immediate response, full of triumph and delight, was, “No. I need to go talk to Hephaestus!” And off the God went, and didn’t come back for hours and hours.

For the next several days the God was almost impossible to be around. He flung himself about the House in a state of near-infuriated impatience, texting Hephaestus’s workshop every hour, it seemed to the Prince, and being as mulishly unwilling to eat or drink as when he was in the middle of a particularly thorny case. The Prince went out any number of times to “get some air”, but always found the God in the same state when he came back in. And none of his own informally texted “prayers” to Hermes were answered—in that no cases that might have got the God out of the House were forthcoming. The Prince was half ready to throw the Shadowcloak over the God’s head and push him bodily out of the place when suddenly on the third afternoon of this madness the sitting room’s air started to fill with line after line of bright-burning letters. At the sight of them the God actually leapt into the air, fists clenched in delight, shouted _“Yes!”,_ and plunged for the Shadowcloak of his own volition. _“Wait here!”_ he told the Prince in a whirl of shadow, and vanished.

The Prince stood there bemused. “Where else would I wait?” he said to the air.

No answer came, for the Thalastrae were keeping a low profile for the moment, and the Skull seemed not to think the question had been directed at it. Fortunately the Prince didn’t have to wait too long. Less than a quarter-hour later the God’s shadow swirled into being in the air of the sitting room, and he threw off the Cloak and came toward the Prince with something dark and angular held in his hands.

“Here, Prince!” the God said. “This is for you.”

The Prince raised his eyebrows and reached out to take what the God was offering him. A slight tremor in the God’s hand distracted him briefly, but not for long. The proffered object was a strange thing, a thick short bar of matte black metal with its corners and edges smoothed to roundness, and a hole at one end. At its other end another broader piece of metal sprang away at an angle, shorter than the main piece and gracefully curved at its back into what seemed like a handhold, since it was carefully textured with exquisitely graven crosshatching. Between the longer and shorter parts of the object was a strip or loop of yet more black metal with a crescent-moon metal curve jutting down into it from the object’s main body.

The Prince ran his hands over it, uncertain why his heart had chosen this moment to start beating faster. “What is it?”

“It’s an engine to throw projectiles. You saw me doing the chemistry. After that it was just a matter of engineering. I did some sketches; Hephaestus knew what was needed after that. He added a few touches, you can’t stop him of course, the God’s such a perfectionist. Materials technology, mostly—no bronze or iron could bear up under these stresses. Only gods and a very, very few mortals know how to make this substance. This is case-hardened carbon steel—”

The Prince folded his hand around the shorter end of the engine, started to slip his finger through the loop, and then stopped himself, somehow feeling that to be the wrong thing to do right this moment. But as he raised the engine to eye level, a shiver went down his spine at the feel of it—weighty and solid and inexplicably powerful—and its fit in his hand was absolutely perfect. He looked at the God in wonder. “How’s it used?”

“Like this,” said the God. He took the projectile engine out of the Prince’s hand, and to the Prince’s astonishment, the God’s hand was still trembling just faintly as it touched his. In that moment some obscure deductive chain began to put itself together in the back of the Prince’s mind, but he had no attention to spare for it right now. Almost all his attention was occupied with watching the God grip the engine as the Prince had, then go on to slip his index finger through the loop between the two parts, resting it against that crescent-shaped bit of metal. The God pointed the longer part of the engine horizontally at the wall, squeezed his index finger back—

 _BANG!_ The crash the thing made in the little space was like thunder, a single word of destruction shouted loud. And a piece of the wall half a hand wide sprang away into the air and flew sideways across the room.

“My _God,”_ said the Prince reverently, though neither in the normal mode of address or in any kind of prayer. He reached out hungrily again for the black steel dogleg of the engine, took it from the God and turned it over in his hands. “It really _is_ like a thunderbolt! How’s it do that?”

“There’s a certain powder that the Gods of Ch’in let their mortals have. Big mistake, as it turns out, but it’s too late now, it’s out there.” The God’s voice was dark with glee. “Prince, just think what you can do with such a thing!”

“I’m thinking!” the Prince said. “How does it work?”

“Look here.” The God took it from him again and pulled the weapon apart at the bottom of the place where one held it, revealing something like an inner casing; thumbed the end of that open. “See these little brazen cartridges? They’re packed full of something that burns very, very fast.”

“ _Burns_ fast—?” There hadn’t been any smoke or fire that the Prince could see. Yet there was certainly a hint of that sharp brimstone stink in the air, the one that had graced their kitchen on too many mornings lately.

“Imagine all the heat and light from a campfire coming out, Prince, not at the usual speed, over hours, but _all at once,_ in a small confined space, in the time it’d take you to blink your eye. There’s not even been a word for that kind of combustion before except among the Ch’in. It’s called an _explosion.”_ The God closed the casing that held the cartridges, snapped it back into the weapon’s butt, pulled back the slide at the top of the weapon to show how there were no cartridges ready to fire, let it slip back and gave him the weapon again. “The mechanism inside here sets that substance alight, starts the explosive burning—then the hot gases drive the cartridge and the pellet of lead inside it down the length of the weapon and out the far end at great speed. And whatever it hits—”

Though the Prince was trying hard to listen to this explanation, it was hard work, for he was very distracted. It wasn’t just that the thing in his hand fit it absolutely perfectly. That was to be expected, after all; Hephaestus had built it, and the absolutely perfect fit of his armoury work was renowned everywhere. But this weapon somehow felt as if it had been _destined_ to be in his hand for a long time—as if, in some strange way, the Prince had been meant for it as much as it had been meant for him, and now they were together at last. And it was all the God’s doing. “I _see_ what happens to what it hits!” the Prince said, looking up at the God with a big grin. “Let’s go outside and try it out on something Mrs. Hudson won’t mind us destroying!”

He spun and headed for the door. But halfway there, with the God in close pursuit, the Prince caught himself, and whirled around and took his friend by the shoulders. The God stopped short and stared at the Prince out of his darkness, a little shocked. “You _imagined_ this, and had it built for me?” the Prince said, peering into the close-wrapped shadow for a glimpse of those silvery eyes. “All this—what it is, what it does—from the powder to the metal to the design—all this came out of your head, for _my_ sake, for _me?”_

“Yes, well, it was obvious, Prince, really, all one had to do was—”

“You are simply _amazing!”_ And the Prince pulled the God close to him, slipped his arms around him (being careful where he was pointing the weapon in his hand), leaned up and kissed the God right on the mouth: then turned and ran for the stairs.

He was out onto the landing before he realized what he’d done. _Wait, what was_ that? part of his mind was shouting at him. _What did you just_ do _there?_

But another part of him was laughing for joy, and for the time being the laughter drowned out any doubts. _What did_ he _just do? That’s the real question. Once more he’s given you something that not just makes you more than you are, but more like you’re_ meant _to be, like you’ve_ always _been meant to be! Is a kiss too much to say thank you for something so tremendous?_

 _Is a kiss anything like_ enough?

He hadn’t stopped on his way down the stairs. Now the House’s door flung itself open for the Prince as he hurried toward it. If he noticed that there was a slight delay in the footsteps that followed him, it was only slight, and he wasn’t going to say anything about it just now. If explanations were needed, the God would demand them—as usual—and if not, they could wait.

***

The two of them spent what remained of that golden afternoon out in the turfy area behind the House destroying all the household crockery that Mrs. Hudson told them she really didn’t like (though the God hurriedly went up to explain things to the Bees after their reaction to the earliest stages of the destruction). The two of them took turns with the new weapon, each of them exulting completely in the other’s successes while at the same time itching to get the wonderful thing back in his own hands again. The Prince was pleased (if unsurprised) to find that the God had a good eye for aim, and a scientist’s quick grasp of ranges and effectiveness. But for his own part, his initial sense of the utter rightness of this weapon for him immediately proved itself true. It took only a few firings—“shots” they decided to call them, for this was after all just a different kind of archery—to reveal to the Prince that this weapon with the fire so beautifully hidden in its bent and slender body was one that exactly suited his gifts.

He’d always been a good marksman, even before his soldiering days. From childhood times when he raised and drew his bow he could almost always see the arrow’s path in his mind’s eye, and nine times out of ten the arrow followed it… for there was something about the bow that spoke to the Prince, something about the way the arrow was going to leap away from it that he could simply feel thrumming in his bones. But then if there’d been a part of the _Odyssey_ he’d loved as a youngster, it had never been the usual bits—the adventures and the battles, the monsters and the Sirens and the journey to the land of the Dead. It was the great archery contest at the end, all weighed down with a sense of oncoming triumph and vengeance as the seeming beggar took into his hands the mighty bow unused for two decades, stroking it as softly as the returning Prince Odysseus hoped soon to stroke the yearned-after body of his beloved wife.

What had left the young Prince taut with excitement was the way Odysseus effortlessly bent and strung the bow no other man alive had been able to bend; then plucked the bowstring so it twittered like a swallow, just once—a sound that wrought terror in the sudden silence of that ancient hall when his wife’s massed suitors realized to their horror that their doom had come upon them. When the poet after dinner would sing that verse, the hair on the young Prince’s neck would stand right up with the strangest mixture of anticipation and desire. _Some day,_ he’d thought with the invincible certainty of a boy of fourteen, _some day_ I’ll _do that. There’ll be a weapon like that for me, a special thing, a magic thing, one no other man can use._

And now, all unlooked-for, “someday” had come. The Prince looked down the length of the weapon, and his eye instantly saw where the projectile would go and taught his arm how it needed to be held to have that happen. The God threw the second-to-last of Mrs. Hudson’s oldest redware plates up into the air, and the Prince tracked with it and fired, and the plate— “They explode,” the Prince said, still grinning, as shards and splinters of the erstwhile plate rained down on them out of the sky. He simply seemed unable to pry that expression off his face. “It _exploded_.”

“Prince, you’re in danger of using that word even more than ‘amazing’ or ‘fantastic’…” But the God was grinning too: there was no mistaking the warmth of it on the Prince’s skin. Delight was there, and satisfaction, and something strangely like relief.

“We need something else to test this on,” the Prince muttered, looking around after the last plate, bearing a gaudy overstated rendition of the Judgment of Paris, met its demise. “Whatever else may have come at me on the battlefield, I’ve never really had a problem with plates.”

The God turned his head toward the house. “Thalastrae?” he shouted. “One of you hurry up and get down to the Tesko! We need _melons.”_

The Prince burst out laughing. “Never had much of a problem with melons, either…” Nonetheless, he saw the God’s point. Shortly there were melons: and terrible things were done to them, things no melon had ever had reason to fear before. The God found it grimly satisfying. The Prince initially found what happened to a melon he’d just shot extremely unsettling… but then imagined the same thing happening to someone intent on harming the God, and found himself much less troubled after.

Eventually the sun went down and the light gave out, though the Prince was starting to feel as if this wouldn’t matter, as if by moonlight or even in darkness he could find his mark. Nonetheless he and the God went inside and had something to eat, hardly even noticing what it was, so busy were they excitedly discussing what they’d both learned from the afternoon’s work. And afterwards the Prince turned his mind to other matters, for no weapon works as it should for long without right care and maintenance.

He spent all that evening by the fire learning how to break the weapon down and put it back together again, first slowly, then more and more quickly… and finally even with his eyes bound shut with the first suitable thing they could readily lay hands on, the belt of the God’s blue silk dressing gown. Even then the weapon came apart under the Prince’s hands as if there was nothing in the world it desired more, and went back together again swiftly, surely, willingly, as if eager to be of service, as if hungry to shout its single deafening word at the Prince’s command, and as many times as necessary. Finally the God laughed at him and said, “Prince, stop it now. Take a break, have some wine.” For the Prince had already made a rule for himself and the God both, that no one was to use alcohol while working with this weapon—it was simply too dangerous.

“I suppose,” the Prince said, smiling. He felt the God lean down to unknot the belt of his dressing gown, which had been wrapped twice around the Prince’s head, and the God’s fingers brushed his temple as he pulled it away and the Prince looked up—

—and caught the look in the pale eyes through the shadow as they leaned close, caught it at the same moment as that faint shiver through the God’s fingertips—

The deductive chain that had begun putting itself together in the Prince’s head much earlier now took that look, that touch, and added them to the problem that had been working itself out, and without warning arrived at a solution. As their gazes rested together, for just that moment the Prince saw unnerved realization flare in the God’s pale eyes—and then hastily the God was straightening up, turning away, shoving the belt through the dressing gown’s belt loops again, heading into the kitchen. “They cracked that amphoriska of the ’14 this morning,” he was saying, for all the world as if nothing of more import was on his mind; “ought to have had more than enough time to breathe by now, do you feel like anything else with that? We didn’t really have that much to eat before, we were both so wound up after all…”

He was still talking, but the Prince was finding it hard to pay attention. He got up and put the weapon gently down on the table beside the left-hand chair, the smile on his face mostly for himself now as he stood gazing for a moment into the fire. It was as if he could feel them all at once, all the casual touches bestowed on him since they’d met and since he’d come here, every one with a slight tremor underlying it, like a whisper: like a question. _Do you want to stay?_ (And all the shadows in the corners of the room had shivered with silent joy.) Or like a different version of the questions the Prince had asked the God, without words, by the hearth in the Palace. _Are you sure you want to be with me? Do you_ really _want to? And if you do: may_ I _be with_ you? _..._ And finally: the look in those silvery eyes just now, this time with no semblance in the way to cloud his perception—the eyes themselves perhaps imperfectly glimpsed through the darkness, but the meaning of the look absolutely clear to the Prince. On seeing what looked out of those eyes at him, his heart had finally spoken to him just as clearly as the God’s touch—not in hope and uncertainty, but in a whisper of disbelieving joy: _This is the one. For a night, and for forever. ‘One thing more,’ you said? This is all the more you will ever desire. At last,_ this is the one!

 _And more than that: he_ wants _to be the one._

The Prince turned away from the fire, still smiling, and headed toward the kitchen, and took the glass of wine the God held out to him, and touched it to the God’s, pledging him, and then had a gulp of it and tried hard to listen to what his friend was saying. But it was difficult, because frankly the God was babbling, something about greatly increased velocities and depleted Urania (and how in Heaven’s name did one deplete a Goddess, or was this some joke at his Mummy’s expense?) and armour-piercing rounds. The Prince meanwhile was thinking about the amazing gift the God had handed him this afternoon, the one that said, however mutely, _On you I will spend the most precious things at my command: my genius, my passion, even time I should be spending on the Work itself, because I care for you:_ _so use this to make sure you live!_ And he smiled again. _How amazing that something so obviously about death can in his hands, by his gift, become about guarding life. But then that’s what he does: what he is_ — _Death’s Godchild, yes, but also murder’s sworn enemy. So why is any of this surprising me?_

 _Because I’m an idiot._ And the Prince grinned like one.

“…but it’s too clumsy really, ‘projectile engine’ is no name for something like this,” the God was saying, “it needs something shorter. What are we going to call it?...”

And there the God finally ran down, sounding almost anxious, and looking at the Prince as if for reassurance: possibly because he could make absolutely no sense of the grin.

The Prince shook his head and tried to calm his face down, and had no idea what success he was having. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, and all Gods be thanked, the quieter smile managed to reassert itself. “Your gift’s like you. It’ll tell us its name when it knows it. Right now it’s what it does, and what it is, that matters.”

“Oh,” the God said.

“And thank you,” the Prince said, reaching out with his free hand to take the God’s in his. “Because no one’s ever wanted to give me anything so magnificent, so absolutely extraordinary…”

The God was looking down at their hands. “Yes, well, it’s important for you to have such a thing, Prince, as should we become separated there are—”

“I didn’t mean the weapon,” said the Prince.

The God lifted his head and stared at him, struck silent.

 _Possibly a first,_ the Prince thought, and just tilted his head a bit to one side, waiting, saying nothing.

“Prince,” the God said then, very low, almost reluctant. “This afternoon…”

“I kissed you,” said the Prince, just as softly. “Well, it’s not as if we haven’t done this before, my God. Didn’t think you’d be averse to an eventual rematch.” The words were humorous enough, but his breath got caught on them a bit and they came out a little throaty.

“There’s no need to do it again just to thank me,” the God said, and the Prince knew the God was purposefully misunderstanding him: the kind of before-the-fact misunderstanding you inflict on yourself to keep someone else from doing it first, hurting you first. “I was only testing you the last time, as you know, and at any rate we’re both in the Work together, and of course we both understand that—”

“We belong together,” the Prince said.

And the God opened his mouth and closed it again without speaking a word of argument or denial. Then he looked away, and every shadow in the room went still.

The Prince put his wine aside, for not Dionysus’s whole wine cellar could ever have warmed him like the feeling now slowly growing in his chest. He reached out and took the God’s wine out of his hand too, putting it down by his own on the counter. Then he reached out to take that free hand in his as well.

“Even in that world so full of people,” the Prince said, very low, “of armies and cities and kingdoms, and journeys across two continents… even then, I was so alone: because I was waiting. But finally you found me, and from that first moment until now you’ve given me so much, and I’ve never been alone. Surely I can give you something, now. The one thing I have that’s mine alone: the thing that's mine alone to give.”

The God held still, held silent.

“Because you were waiting, too,” the Prince said. “Not even really knowing what for, I bet. But you made yourself ready to find out. You found the Work. You created your job. You learned what you needed to become, and forged yourself into that. Yes, sometimes you risked your life to prove you were clever. But you also did great things, saved lives, helped Justice prevail. Even while you were still waiting…”

There was a long, long pause. “Biding my time,” the God said at last. And then, much, much more softly: “Knew you’d turn up.”

“No you didn’t,” the Prince said, just above a whisper, speaking the truth the other couldn’t speak, for until this very moment he’d never dared trust hope over knowledge. “But all the same, you waited. And here I am.”

And he smiled up into the eyes of his God, and waited one more time.

The eyes in that veiling shadow closed; the shoulders shook with breaths that seemed to be having a hard time coming. Two breaths: three. The Prince’s heart pounded in his ears.

And then, just slightly… so slowly… the God’s head inclined toward his.

The Prince took those long warm hands he held and gently drew them upward, held them against his chest; laid them one over the other against him there, laid his right hand over them. Then he slipped his left hand around to slide up through the shadow, through the soft dark curls at the back of the head still slowly bowing itself to meet his. And mindful of his promise, as he drew the God’s face downward and his own slipped up into the enwrapping shadow, the Prince closed his eyes.

It was strange, feeling the shadow flow across his skin… warm, like a breath, but still; like the feeling of sunlight on his face, if sunlight could be dark. But then he was inside it, and the Prince could feel soft breath against his face, some of it from parted lips. He sighed into it, leaned in.

Some of his lovers had told him that he had a special gift for what came next—and that some men might be called honey-tongued because of their skill at oration or poetry, but in the Prince’s case, when someone whispered of him, or to him, _meliglossos_ , it had nothing to do with talking. The Prince had always smiled to hear that. It was true that he loved it; that the kiss was to him far more than merely the gateway to other more intimate acts. Oration and poetry aside, whole long lovely conversations could be held in this idiom, drawing the body with them to ecstasy’s edge and sometimes even beyond. Yet here, on the very brink of beginning such a colloquy, the Prince found himself hesitating as if he’d never been here before. _But then I never have. Not with the one I’ve been waiting for. Not with_ you…

The pain of the hesitation was almost as sweet as what he knew lay beyond it, and just briefly the Prince lingered in it, taking one long moment to breathe in the God’s scent. It wasn’t as if this would be the first time; they’d been together long enough for the Prince to have caught it admixed with endless other aromas—sweat, laundry herbs and bath essences, failed experiments and far too successful ones, pine and spruce and strawberry-tree in the forest near Tiryns, midden-stink outside the city walls of Argos, alley-wall muck in the Elis slums. Here, though, there was nothing but a touch of wine… and the God. _Oh, so complicated,_ the Prince thought, breathing him in deep. _Like you._ About his skin hung a faint dark sweet tang like honey and smoke, yet also with something sharp about it—a hint of citron, a subtle bitter edge like rue. The Prince breathed out, beguiled, tilted his head a little to one side, leaned in deeper…

His mouth touched the other’s, started to learn its shape as his lips brushed across it. A beautiful mouth, both delicate and full, the lips finely sculpted as if some great artist had thought them out. _Well, you half-suspected as much,_ the Prince thought. Even through the shadow he’d caught enough casual glimpses before this of a noble clean-cut profile against the light of the windows, a high cheekbone silhouetted against the firelight in the evenings. _But this is almost unfair:_ so _much beauty._ And doubt raised its head then. _Who am I to be kissing such a mouth? A mortal with wounds and scars and wrinkles, with age working in my face and in my bones…_

But when that mouth gently moved under his, and softly began to kiss him back, doubt faded, and shame suddenly became ashamed of itself and fled away in the face of desire. The Prince breathed, smiled, took those lips each in its turn between his own, stroking, ever so gently nipping, stroking again. Under his attentions the other’s mouth warmed to his touch, returned in kind each favour; and when the Prince let the tip of his tongue tentatively slide forward to slip along the delicious curve of the God’s lower lip, quite shortly it made the sweet acquaintance of the counterpart that had stolen out to greet it. They slid together, tasting, touching, teasing by turns, each inviting the other inwards, each accepting in turn the invitation and greeting the welcome visitor wetly, warmly, while breaths grew quicker and pulses faster, and the Prince felt the weight and heat of his arousal starting to become a distraction to be reckoned with…

 _Slowly, go slowly!_ part of his mind kept insisting, yet somehow he was losing track of time, of how to breathe, of anything but the warm juncture of his mouth and the God’s, and of the hardening heat that was gathering below. _Oh, if this is how it feels when a God desires you, maybe I can understand some of the crazy things mortals do when they get involved with one..._ Yet no sooner had the idea occurred to the Prince than it was lost again, swept off in the flood of sensation that was dissolving the clarity of his thought away into itself like a single water-drop fallen into red wine, and once more everything became about the kiss, the heat sliding and stroking above and building below—

…until it slowly stopped, the other’s lips withdrawing.

Confused, concerned, the Prince pulled gradually back, making sure he felt the coolth of unshadowed air against his face again before he opened his eyes. He searched the shadow above him for some sense of what might have gone wrong; but the pale eyes were closed.

“I’m, uh,” the Prince said softly, and tried to sound calm, though his heart was seizing, and he was ashamed and alarmed at his loss of control. “I, listen, it could be that I rushed this. Sorry, I’m so sorry. Perhaps I should just—”

But one of those long graceful hands was slipping free of where it had been held warm against the Prince’s heart. It came up to brush its thumb across his mouth, lingering there lightly to stop his words, then sliding sideways to tenderly cup his face. And the silvery eyes, open now though still only half-seen, looked down into his as if there was nothing else in the world they cared to see.

“Just stay, my Prince,” said that deep soft voice, “...for one thing more.”

Darkness fell across the Prince’s face as the God leaned slowly in to kiss his eyes closed. The God’s other hand slid gently up behind the Prince’s head and into the softness of his hair, guiding him once more into the veiling shadow… and then, as their lips met again, drawing him deeper still, through the shadow and past it, into night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maps, notes, and background info for this story can be found at the [Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumbr.com)


	20. Of the Prince's Gift and How the God Received It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The God makes a strategic withdrawal, and a dangerous choice. The locks on bedroom doors become an issue. The Prince gets physical, and sees things differently. The Palace of Thought undergoes ructions... and at last, the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees makes a (joint) accommodation. 
> 
> _Warnings for deep (divine) background, stream of (rampant un-)consciousness, flashbacks, sweats and tremors, first-time issues, tab A refusing to go into slot G, two heads being_ way _worse than one, and the (beginning of the) fulfillment of the decrees of the Fates._

_Just stay, my Prince. Just wait…_

_…for one thing more._

***

Days before, when the God had dropped his final explosives calculations and weapons-design specs off at Hephaestus’s lab for implementation, he’d immediately found himself in a terrible state—half-exhausted from having finally solved a problem that had been worrying at him for weeks, but with no new case to energize him, still upset from the root cause of the problem, and with nothing left to do but think. There was probably no more perilous state for him: not even boredom posed as many dangers.

He therefore spent most of the next three days thrashing about the House, too distracted to complete old experiments or start new ones, too annoyed to relax, too wired to sleep and too unsettled to eat. He was well aware that the Prince was being driven half to distraction by all of this, and the God would have hated this state of mind in himself even without the Prince’s reaction… yet he still couldn’t shake himself out of it. So by night and by day for the next three days he mentally swerved back and forth amongst problems he’d been avoiding and subjects he really didn’t want to be thinking about, and his mood got fouler by the moment.

Yet even as his unrest wracked him, the God set part of his mind to analyze its cause, certain that any conundrum presenting itself to him could eventually be deduced to its root. So it was that around dawn of the third day—always a weighty day for Gods in process—some hours before the text from Hephaestus came in, the Consulting God sat in his chamber, in the dark, in brooding silence, staring at a list.

Of all the many darknesses at the God’s command, only the one that filled this chamber was truly private. This was the shadow within the shadow, where Alone protected him, inviolate. The chamber was both shelter and gateway—a place where he could take refuge when need be from the relentless flood of data that assailed him. It also functioned as a sort of anteroom to the God’s Palace of the Mind, an area where data useful to him could be sorted before being catalogued and stored. That portal and place of the God’s respite was what the Bees had manifested themselves to protect: and as soon as the God had become aware of how vital his chamber was to him, the House had rearranged itself around that personal space so as to ward it, surrounding it with unseen and complex safeguards. No one ever set foot across its threshold but he.

Outside the House, and sometimes even inside it, the God wore the darkness of the inner chamber’s shadow to protect himself both from the world’s regard and (most recently) from the Prince’s gaze, for both the mortal’s sake and his own. And when wearing this shadow, or immersed in it here, he had always thought himself unassailable. But now he was beginning to wonder.

 _I am supposedly the smartest God on Olympus,_ he thought. … _Not supposedly._ Am. Am _the smartest._

_So how was it I didn’t see this coming?_

In the silence and the darkness—which was not dark to him; he could see in it quite well—the God stared down at his hands, which rested on his lap and held the small writing-tablet he kept by the couch for when some useful thought or case-solution came to him on waking from sleep. Written on the tablet were three questions that the God’s past two days of troubled thought and analysis now left him facing. They were these:

(α) Is there an illegal goddess secretly living under my couch? Or,

(β) Am I simply ten times the idiot I’ve sometimes told the Prince he is? And either way,

_(γ) What in Heaven’s name do I do now?_

***

The Goddess in question was Atê, and her name meant Blindness, or Folly, depending on who you were talking to. To say her family history was troubled would have been putting it mildly, as her mother (another enthusiastic practitioner of parthenogenesis) was Eris the Lady of Strife; her brothers and sisters were Pain and Starvation, Murder and Manslaughter, Falsehood and Lawlessness and Toil.

The family was understandably unpopular on Olympus. Eris had after all more or less singlehandedly caused the Trojan War over not being invited to a wedding (though the God knew perfectly well that she was taking advantage of pre-existing sociopolitical conditions), and most of the children had been slapped with ASBOs and either weren’t permitted on Olympus or had been cast out of it. (Falsehood, to the God’s dry amusement, constantly kept sneaking back and giving him something new to deduce among the local population.) Sometimes the “casting out” was quite literal: Atê the Blinder had personally been grabbed by her hair by Zeus, swung around his head and bodily pitched off Olympus after an oath he unwittingly swore under her influence forced his favorite son Herakles into humiliating servitude to the mortal King Eurystheus.

Yet the Consulting God was now wondering whether the Blinder might possibly have weaseled her way back onto the Mount somehow, slipped past the Bees’ vigilance, and sneaked into his House. Because as he considered in detail the matters that had been troubling him, he couldn’t understand how it had taken him so long to grasp them and what their confluence meant. They were, if he was any judge, about to change his whole life: his whole world. And now the God sat there on his couch in his pyjamas, legs crossed under him, looking down at the tablet, his mind leaping from issue to issue in search of a problem’s resolution… and he trembled.

***

But hardly for the first time. It seemed such a short while ago that he’d sat and shivered to find himself lost in the gaze of dark blue eyes.

It hadn’t been an overload of data that shook him, that day in the Kingdom’s little city, but the lack of it: not the routine inescapable roar of information inside the God’s mind, but instead an inexplicable stillness that for just a short time settled down around him, leaving him for perhaps the first time ever in quietude enough to hear a heart speak to him without his having to listen for it first.

At the time the uniqueness of the experience got rather lost in the shuffle, since within moments the God was rendered barely conscious by physical pain of a kind he’d never experienced before, and then immediately on recovering himself got dragged deep into the bizarre fascination of watching someone sew up “his” leg with the easy expertise of long practice, as if the wound was no harder to deal with than a popped-off button. But afterwards, when he was back home on Olympus and exhaustion finally drove him to his couch, the God couldn’t fall into sleep’s unwelcome embrace without remembering how strange and _impossible_ it was to feel that stillness fold close around him. Until now only his chambers had offered him anything like it. And even in that shadow the best he’d ever been able to achieve was an unselective wide-spectrum muting, like wrapping his whole head in some arcane substance as sound-dulling as a cloud. (His scarf was a memento of one such early experiment, which though ineffective at improving the sound/noise ratio had at least been good for keeping his throat warm). In the God’s chamber not only the incessant scream of the data but his own thought was muffled. This new effect, though, left his thoughts alone while somehow throttling back the roar of data… a result he’d thought impossible.

The God’s re-examination of the moment drew him back in memory to those sea-blue eyes, and their reaction to him, which had been unexpected. Their expression had suggested that the Prince somehow _knew_ the apparently timeworn body he was treating wasn’t entirely what it seemed. Yet the Prince hadn’t been afraid: only curious and somehow expectant. Nor had he harbored any doubts about the concern he’d felt about his patient, or considered withdrawing the sentiment as misplaced…

 _Sentiment._ It was the first time the God could remember thinking the word without turning it into a curse.

And the words he’d heard the Prince’s heart speak in that brief, atypical hush of the mind had proven so typical of him. _I wish I could help. Please don’t be hurting too badly. It’s going to be all right._ Here in the darkness the God felt again those sensations he’d found he couldn’t master and irrationally didn’t want to: the peculiar clenching swooping feeling in the gut, the completely unreasonable bloom of warmth in the chest, the way his skin actually prickled into gooseflesh where the mortal’s hands touched him—as if bodies could somehow speak directly to one another without the minds that ran them having anything to do with the conversation. Too soon the stillness that had descended on the God’s mind that day slipped away again, replaced by the usual inward-pressing rush and howl of data. But while it lasted, it had been marvelous.

When on their next meeting the phenomenon recurred, the God was waiting for it, ready for a more in-depth comparison to his chamber’s sheltering darkness. And the calm hush that ensued while he sat in the Prince’s company felt even more different, on close examination. It seemed somehow to be based in the murmur of the blood in the mortal’s veins and the breath in his lungs and the thoughts in his mind, the steady ebb-and-swell certainties of his life’s rhythms and the way he’d learned to ride them, calm as a seabird riding the waves. Somehow when all these factors together met the incessant roar of data in the God’s mind, the two effects commingled for a little while into a smooth slack-tide of quiet, like sine waves canceling… and the quizzical, warm regard of the dark blue eyes resting on the God once again underlaid it all.

Then unfolding events took them elsewhere in company; and in the stables on Olympus, in the windy night sky over the Argolid, in the dark corridors of the palace at Tiryns, even amid the rush of clue-gathering and the thick of deduction, the God found the Prince’s presence affecting him in other ways. Around him the God had flashes of a narrowing of focus, a strange sense of some new kind of rightness, like a knife learning to sharpen itself toward a keener edge—everything combining to better serve the Work. And yes, the effect faded again without warning, but still there was the ever-strengthening likelihood that over time it would come back again to be more fully understood.

The God would never understand it, though, without getting to know the Prince much better; and in this regard his curiosity drove him hard. After their first case was done and the Prince was settling into the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees, the God spent many a night moving over the surface of the Prince’s dreams… skimming over the shifting skin of them, diving beneath the surface when he glimpsed something bright moving beneath. There he found much that had to do with the joys and pains and passions of the Prince’s life in the Kingdom and elsewhere across the two continents he knew, and some of these images or moments he copied and tucked away in his Palace of the Mind for later study. But among these vivid moments, to his surprise, he came across the reflection of a dream that was not one the House had by his command shut away from the Prince: a recurring dream of fire and shadow. _His_ fire: _his_ shadow.

That vision unnerved the God, for it was nothing _he’d_ sent. And it didn’t take a Consulting God to deduce what its presence in the Prince’s mind meant. There was some greater power interested in him, the Fates or Destiny perhaps—one of the mighty forces that moved even Gods as the Gods moved mortal beings. The very idea infuriated the Consulting God out of all proportion. How _dare_ some vague personified power come poking its nose into his life and interfere with his Prince, with his Work and his need to do it better! It was absolutely intolerable. And alone there in his chamber he’d paced and growled and sworn at the Fates or any other power that might listen to the complaints of an angry God… while scowling furiously at the irony that the only one who _could_ be guaranteed to pay attention to such complaints was upstairs in his room, sleeping the boring sleep of the incorrigibly mortal.

Yet that mood quickly burned itself out as the Consulting God came to realize, with the passage of days and weeks, that regardless of the attentions of Destiny or the Fates or whoever, the Work kept going smoothly. Nor was it damaged by the Prince’s presence or the things he did. It was improved… and not just by that quieting, focusing effect that manifested itself more and more often. Oh, the Prince had his weaknesses, his irrelevancies, his quirks that were hard for the God to bear sometimes: plenty of them. He could be tyrannical about food and rest when there was no real need for either. He could be insistent on politeness to beings who didn’t particularly deserve it, when his attention should rightfully have been closer to home, on himself or the God. He could be maddeningly slow on the uptake, and sometimes had to be dragged through the simplest chain of reasoning like a hound on a rope.

But other times, in fact increasingly frequently of late, the Prince would pause to focus on some aspect of a case that the God had—well, not _missed_. He missed very little. But he’d discounted it, discarded it as useless, until the Prince started examining it from some different, unlikely angle. Then, on looking down that sightline with him, it was for the God as if a previously hidden light had somehow been brought to bear on the case from some completely unexpected angle; and it was the Prince who was that light’s conductor. In a flash some knotty obscurity of the case would be blindingly illuminated by it, and the God’s mind would pounce on the truth revealed by that new light and seize on the case’s solution in triumph.

What he still couldn’t fully comprehend was the way the Prince’s eyes would then simply glint with delight as he started telling the God how brilliant he was, how amazing. True as that might be, the God couldn’t understand how little concerned the Prince was about taking credit for _his_ part in what had happened. It was what the God did with the data that seemed to count most for him. If after the chase and the capture of the guilty was over the God thought to compliment his colleague, the Prince would grin a little and thank him, and then go on with whatever else he was doing. If the God forgot to acknowledge something extremely useful the Prince had done, then yes, the Prince would twit him about it quite hard until some form of acknowledgement was forthcoming. But that was as far as matters would go. When he started writing up the case, the God was always portrayed as its protagonist and driving force—the one who brought order and justice out of chaos and danger—and the Prince appeared simply as colleague and partner, quite happy in those roles.

Right there was one way in which the God felt the Prince was much understating his own case, not to mention his importance to the life of the House, and to him. Iaon was a powerful presence in his own right (not that he ever saw himself that way). Such was his unconsciousness in this regard that the God wondered if the Prince even noticed how, since they’d started to work together, he was becoming even more of a force to be reckoned with: smarter, quicker, fiercer than before. And as time went by his complexities continued to unfold until the God, secretly delighted by the prospect, started to wonder whether he was ever going to see the end of them.

There was so _much_ of Iaon. Warrior yet also healer, earnest part-time poet yet also unrepentant farmboy, lover of tea and takeaway and home-by-the-fire ease, yet also doughty pursuer of God and malefactor alike through endless dark alleys; kindly, funny, thoughtful, brave, empathetic, practical, patient, gentle; courteous and foul-mouthed, sometimes within moments of each other; critical when he felt the need to be, yet endlessly accepting… and _ready._ Paired with the Prince’s rock-solid loyalty was an essential readiness for absolutely anything that came their way. And only the most foolish observer would mistake the Prince for a mere follower. Where the God went, the Prince went _with_ him, at his side. If he sometimes dropped back a bit, it was simply because that was a better position for watching the God’s back in the dark.

And it was in darkness, and the face of pain, that the Prince’s strengths showed most clearly. The God often caught himself musing over the almost matter-of-fact selflessness of a man who had offered his life to the Gods if doing that would save his people; a man who, despite the terrible turmoil in his own heart, had with unfailing dignity walked a two days’ journey to what he thought was likely to be his death. It was behaviour most unusual for a mortal, so many of whose lives seemed taken up with wild accesses of emotion that led to them hurting each other, hating each other, cheating each other, killing each other. But even here, safe from the danger that had threatened him—mostly—the Prince continued to wear his strong moral principle as reliably and casually as he wore those heavy linen-canvas tunics he favored: workaday garments, nothing fancy, but each for him an easy habit that not even life on Olympus and the visitations of Gods could shake.

The Prince, in short, was a mystery—indeed many of them, of various intensities, tightly wrapped up in a single compact sandy-haired package. Of course the Consulting God had one tried and tested way to deal with mysteries: tear them apart level by level and reason his way to the bottom of them. But the Prince resisted such treatment. Solve one of his secrets—or think you did—and the Prince would simply without effort or even conscious intent display another level not previously perceived. For a good while the Consulting God had thought there would be some one key, some single piece of data that once found would solve the Prince as if he was a crime scene. But by the time the God realized that there was no such simple way to reason down to the bottom of _this_ mystery—that he’d ventured into a realm where reason was in fact no use to him—it was too late; he was already lost.

***

Because very gradually the issue of touch, of physical closeness, started creeping in. Sometimes this happened against the God’s will, as when they rode Pegasus; sometimes accidentally, as when they wound up pressed against each other, front to front, in the dark in the palace in Tiryns. The God’s body, it seemed, nudged perhaps by the more obscure depths of his mind, had already known something he hadn’t figured out yet, and had spoken without consulting him, seeking out the other’s warmth—that closeness that even so soon after they’d met had seemed to be on offer. The God was most unnerved afterwards, half afraid that he was somehow violating hospitality. Yet in the other’s mind at such times, along with the answering warmth, there was also a conscious realization of what happened when immortal flesh touched its mortal counterpart. And with that realization had come no rejection: rather a quick and quiet acceptance of it, and an understanding that there were no disguises here to muddle the ethical picture. They were partners in the House, grown men in a growing friendship, who could make their own choices.

A little emboldened by that realization, occasionally the God found himself stealing a casual touch or two when the Prince’s mood made it plain such might be welcomed: fingers lingering together when a wineglass was passed, a shoulder leaning companionably against the other’s as they bent down together over the kitchen table to examine some extravagantly failed experiment, a hand on the wrist to hold the Prince still when a princess among the Bees landed on his nose to look him over. Each time something made the God shiver a little in reaction, and he prayed the Prince didn’t notice. But whether he did or not, his housemate’s only interior response to these casual contacts came as a kind of shy pleasure, so restrained, so careful. His Prince, it seemed, didn’t want to hurt him.

That by itself was extraordinary. Mostly mortals were afraid of Gods hurting _them_. How did it come about that a mortal was concerned about possibly hurting a _God?_ It made no sense. And the moment of that discovery was the first time that fear of what was happening truly touched him. The Consulting God realized he was venturing into a part of life where common sense somehow held less sway and Reason didn’t invariably rule—where there were deeper and more dangerous currents running, able to sweep mere fact away and leave you drowning in sensation and emotion and all that part of life’s experience from which the God had walled himself away, long ago.

But the walls were crumbling now, letting the sea in. That blue, the dark blue of his Prince’s eyes, was genuinely unfathomable; their gaze kept meeting the God’s and telling him things willingly that he’d never dreamed of hearing from any being.

Not that there weren’t occasional riptides associated with this process, or places where the bottom suddenly fell away and one found oneself in the grip of some unexpected undertow. There’d been that afternoon when they’d finished up the Polyphemos case, and when they got back the Prince had gone straight to his chair, reached for the tablets and started scribbling. The God was in one of his less stressful forms of recovery, which mostly meant pacing back and forth in high good humour and discoursing nonstop about the idiocy of Hermes’s poor luckless minions, though one of the newer ones had briefly caught his attention. “That, what’s his name again, Khorioun Dymokëidês[¹](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/32259686448/chapter-21-notes-and-links#dimmock) at least; he’s showing signs of being significantly less stupid that the others. In fact he reminds me of you a little.”

The Prince, not looking up from his writing, smiled slightly. “How on Earth would he do that?”

“Well, he’s got the beginnings of a brain,” the God said. The Prince didn’t look up, just laughed a single breath of dry amusement down his nose at a gibe he’d heard launched in his direction more than once. “But there’s also that affect of youthful innocence he’s so eager to cover up. Tough-edged though he tries to seem, it’s laughably transparent. He’s the youngest of all Hermes's staff and he’s compensating hard.”

The Prince’s smile went wider, though he didn’t look up. “And you think I exude an affect of youthful innocence.” He finished a line, smoothed down the wax on the next. “The ‘innocence’ part, _that’s_ bollocks. ‘Youthful,’ though?” He grinned. “Maybe compared to a God…”

The God snorted and flopped down into his chair, folding himself up knees-to-chin. “Seriously, Prince, stop fishing for compliments. You’re in your prime as mortals reckon such things.”

The Prince was still amused. “‘Affect of youthful innocence,’ though… That almost scans. I might steal that for something.” He reached for a different tablet to make a note.

“You shouldn’t advertise your tendencies toward literary piracy, my Prince,” said the God. “The poets will get wind of it, and when they do they’ll turn on you.”

“I don’t do it often.”

“You do it constantly.” The God smiled smugly, wrapping his arms around his legs. “What about ‘Of course it takes the power of one divine / to change things so that though I seemed death-doomed / yet here I am quite young and well, quite glad / and in fine fettle. For it’s no bigger a deal / for God to raise a mortal man above / his station than it is to cast him down…’”

As the God spoke he saw the Prince glance up at him, at first a touch surprised. But halfway through the verses the Prince’s face began changing. A strangely stern expression slid into place there and set in hard...and by the time the God finished the quote, he was starting to nervously wonder if he’d just carelessly committed a tactical error.

“Excuse me,” the Prince said, in a voice that suggested being excused wasn’t really on his mind. _“How_ did you find out about that?”

 _Oh no._ Oh _no. D_ efinitely _a tactical error, how to recover_ — _?_ “Well, it would have been an obvious deduction from the text you sent to Bassae—” Which was the truth, just with a mental reservation that the Prince couldn’t possibly guess at…

 _“Not_ obvious, my God,” said the Prince, his voice starting to go quiet in a particular way that the God had seen strike fear into their enemies before, but he’d never thought would ever do the same to him. “Not obvious at _all._ That being the whole point of me choosing the lines I actually sent in the first place, which were _not_ the ones you just quoted.”

“Well, when I say obvious, obvious to _me,_ of course, not to the common run of—”

“I’d say it’s a little late to be attempting misdirection.” Of late the God had occasionally got the feeling that those eyes could sometimes see as clearly into _him_ as he saw into the mortal. He was getting it now, and it was most unnerving, because it shouldn’t be possible. “There is simply no way you got that particular piece of information just by deducing me. Not even _you_.”

“Ah. But if you’ll just take a moment to _think_ about it—” The God unfolded himself so that he could slump down in the chair and stretch out and look insouciant while he stalled.

But his insouciance seemed to be having no significant effect on the Prince. “I’ll be glad to if you’ll show me how. Talk me through exactly how you deduced _that_ set of verses from the lines[²](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/32259686448/chapter-21-notes-and-links#lines) I sent to my parents, which are six stanzas further along in the poem.”

Those blue eyes. Their blue was less that of the sea, now, and more that of steel. They were not going to look away. They were locked on his and they were making him feel naked, even inside his shadows.

 _Fine; there’s an easy out, here. Make something up. Lie! …_ But there was that feeling again, that somehow the Prince would know. He knew _now_ , for one thing—

“You can’t, can you,” said the Prince. “Because you just lifted it out of my head.”

 _…oh no oh no he’s going to be angry that’s not what I wanted he shouldn’t be angry if he’s angry then he, then I,_ no _this is all wrong_ why is this going wrong _why can’t I think what to do now,_ why _did I—_

“You need to stop that,” said the Prince. “It’s going to be intolerable pretty soon if I can’t even have an idea without wondering if you’re in there with me, knowing what I think at the exact same moment. It’s not normal.”

 _“Normal,”_ the God said, hurriedly now sitting up crosslegged in his chair and desperately deploying some casual scorn in a last-ditch attempt to get the Prince off this line. “Normalcy’s so overrated—”

“Privacy’s not,” said the Prince. “Even in Heaven, I note that the bedroom doors still have locks.” The God rolled his eyes and sighed a great _boring!_ sigh and turned his face away, trying not to do it too quickly but also desperately hoping the Prince hadn’t somehow caught some sign of his initial reaction to the thought of bedroom doors, and of possibly someday finding one purposely left unlocked, even perhaps intentionally left ajar—

The Prince leaned his head way around so that he was again in line with the God’s eyes. “This is important, my God. There are just some things I’d rather tell you myself. Because when you need to know those things, and you ask me about them, then I have a chance to _choose_ to give them to you. To make you a gift of something that might be personal to me: to do it _willingly_.”

“Well—”

“So if you want to know what I’m thinking, you can either just deduce it—which I know you can’t help—or _ask_ me.”

“But Prince—” The Consulting God had already thought of several excuses why he should be allowed to go on doing as he’d done. The Prince might have forgotten something the God needed to know, might not see it as clearly as the God would see it by just looking inside his mind, might take too long to describe it when time was of the essence… But quite suddenly a thing happened that had never happened before. The God could _feel_ how the Prince would feel if he said that—his hurt, his upset. And he could hear what the Prince would think next, even if he didn’t say it aloud: _You don’t trust me._

The God swallowed, suddenly hearing Mykroft’s voice saying, _He will have trust issues._ And his own, saying scornfully: _He has none with_ me.

 _…But he_ will, _though, if I don’t agree to what he’s proposing._ And the God actually burst into a sweat. _Anything,_ he thought, anything _to keep Mykroft from being right. Anything at_ all.

The Prince sat quiet while all this was going on, just looking at the God out of those blued-steel eyes, his face quite still, revealing nothing. “Promise me,” the Prince said at last, “that if you want to know what I’m thinking, you’ll ask me instead of just going in there and taking it.”

The God’s shoulders sagged as he opened his mouth, shut it again. Then he said in what turned out to be a very small voice when it actually came out of him, “…Unless invited?”

The Prince blinked. “What?”

“Prince,” and the God swallowed, he actually had to _swallow_ because his mouth was dry, “the inside of your head is, it’s a _good_ place. Maybe you might want to invite me in, sometimes, so I could visit. Just for a little while...”

Very slowly, that little half-smile that the God liked so much to see started to show itself on what had been, for what seemed like far too long, entirely too still and stern a face. Then, after a breath or two, “Maybe I might,” the Prince said. “All right. Promise me you’ll stay out of my head unless invited. …And the invitation,” he added, “is on a single-conversation basis, understand? No idly popping in and out of my head for hours or days afterwards just because I forgot to tell you that visiting hours were over.”

 _He’s too bloody clever by half,_ the God thought, torn between annoyance and admiration: but the overall feeling was of relief. “I promise,” he said.

“Good. Thank you.” And suddenly those eyes were beginning to smile again, and their blue was shading back into that of the sea.

The God sagged with relief as the remnants of fear started to ebb away. _What am I becoming,_ he thought. And then corrected himself as the fear started to rise again. _No. What have I_ become?...

“So come on, then,” said the Prince.

The God looked up. “…What?”

“Don’t you want to see?” And the Prince’s grin broke out all the way, like sun through cloud. “It must be driving you crazy. You might’ve caught the verses themselves… but you can’t figure out _why_ I chose them, can you? No _context_. And without context, no code can truly be broken. That’s what this last case’s been all about, after all…”

For a moment the God could do nothing but gape at the Prince. The eternal unpredictability of the man, despite his constantly-displayed love of pattern and routine: it was _delightful_ , if on some levels maddening. _And now no sooner does he erect a barrier than he opens it to me…!_

That was possibly the first time the thought clearly formed itself in the God’s mind: _O my Prince… you are far, far better than I will ever deserve. What kindly power was it that brought us together? Because I owe it a sacrifice._

The Prince laughed. “You should see your face! Or what I can make out of it. …Never mind. What do you need me to do?”

Hesitantly the God hitched forward a little in his chair and put out a hand to him. “I am your suppliant,” he said, very low. “If you will, bring me across the threshold.”

Without hesitation the Prince reached out and took his hand.

And instantly it was as if they stood together, still hand in hand but side by side, on the cracked cobble-setts of the wide space inside the gate of the Kingdom’s city. But it wasn’t as the God had seen it when he was there. Everything looked somehow fresher, newer. Some buildings he’d seen were missing: some were smaller than they’d been when he visited.

And inside the gates everything was busy. The space was full of people hurrying in various directions, carrying gear, loading wagons, leading mules and donkeys, driving swine; and closer to the gate, armed men with spears and a few chariots were foregathering. But the Prince’s attention was on none of this. A few yards off to one side, on the steps that led down from the podium of the Palace, a tall muscular dark-bearded man in bronze-and-leather armor sat with his arms around a fair-haired boy of perhaps eight years. The boy’s arms were thrown tightly around the man’s neck and his face was pushed hard into it: his shoulders shook as the man stroked the boy’s hair.

“This is so strange,” the Prince said under his breath. “How am I seeing this from over here? I’m over _there.”_

“My fault,” said the God. “Adding an immortal’s viewpoint pulls everything a level of perception further out. I’m sorry—”

“No,” the Prince breathed, “no, it’s all right.” He shook his head. “I’m so _small_. And my father, oh God, look how _young_ he is…”

“I don’t want you to go,” the young Prince was saying into the King’s neck. “Arête doesn’t want you to go either. And Mother was crying last night. If you loved us, you wouldn’t go!”

The King sighed. “Son,” he said, “I wish I didn’t have to go either. But it’s _because_ I love you that I must. I have to go with the army so we can all keep you safe from people who’d make slaves of you, or kill you, if they could. That’s my job.” He gently took hold of the boy’s fair head and pushed it away from him a little ways, making the boy look into his eyes. “Your job, now, is to be here and help the Steward and your mother keep the city safe. And since you’re the Crown Prince, you have to show everyone how to be brave and bear up under being afraid, because almost everybody’s as afraid as you are, and the ones who say they aren’t are idiots.”

Even in the extremity of the moment there was an undercurrent of dry humor in the King’s voice, slightly desperate though it might be; and when he chuckled, his son managed to laugh a little bit with him, though the sound was edged with the sob he was restraining. “So can you?” the King said. “It won’t be easy. But it’s got to be done.”

“I can,” the young Prince said. And as the boy looked his father in the eye and that thin little back straightened itself, for several long moments the God’s breath unaccountably got stuck in his chest.

“There speaks Iaon Dasosarchëidês,” said his father, “who never said ‘I can’ and failed to do it. So I’m content.” And he kissed his son’s forehead. “Now. Remember the stanzas we were doing last night?” The boy nodded. “Say them with me?”

They began to recite together, the thin boy’s voice and the man’s deep one. “‘…And they cried together the way sea-eagles do, / when some hunter comes and takes their chicks from the nest / not even fledged yet: they huddle together and moan / and shake with their pain: that’s how father wept with son.’”

Beside the God, the Prince swallowed once, hard, as the verses finished. “That’s just what we’ll do when I get back home, you and I,” said the King to his son. “We’ll grab hold of each other and have the biggest cry in the Kingdom. But we can’t do it now. Now, today, we have to go to our work dry-eyed: and try to stay that way.”

“All right,” the young Prince said, and very slowly let his father go.

The King’s hand reached out to rest in his son’s hair again for a few moments: then he stood. “Come on and help me with this tackle, then,” he said, and picked up the spear that lay on the steps beside him. The young Prince picked up the shield that lay by it, struggling a little with the unwieldy weight of it, and the two went off toward where horsemen and hoplites were moving closer to the city gates.

The Prince and the God watched them go. “And did you?” the God said quietly. “Weep like Odysseus and Telemachus?”

“Yes we did,” said the Prince. “It was epic.” And the half-smile he produced at this point was edged with pain as the little boy’s laughter had been edged with tears. He swallowed hard again. “Now: here’s your context—”

And a blink later they were standing in the doorway of the royal chambers upstairs in the Palace, late on some early autumn evening fifteen or so years on, for the Prince sitting on a low chair by the hearthside was in his early twenties. He was in casual housewear—a long light white linen tunic like that of his father, who was stretched out on the nearby lounging couch, listening to his son with eyes closed. Curled up against him, the Prince’s mother, in a soft sleeveless ankle-length linen gown, was gazing over at her son as he recited.

The Prince was staring into the fire but not at it: what he was seeing was something else entirely. “‘…after all this wandering, so much suffered elsewhere,’” he was saying softly, “‘your father’s come home finally to our native land. / Of course it takes the power of one divine / to change things so that though I seemed death-doomed—’” and he swallowed hard— “‘yet here I am quite young and well, quite glad / and in fine fettle. For it’s no bigger a deal / for God to raise a mortal man above, above his station…’”

The Prince stopped, squeezed his eyes shut, and pinched his nose just at its bridge. His father’s eyes opened at the pause and the change of voice, and he looked over at his son, his eyebrows up. “Iaon?”

“I’m all right,” the Prince said after a moment. He cleared his throat, and sniffed once: but then he laughed.

“What is it, dear?” his mother said. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” the Prince said, and wiped his eyes. “It’s just, those next verses are coming. The damn eagles. They always get to me.”

He looked up and over at his father, and their gazes rested together. “But why’re you crying?” his mother said.

“He’s happy,” said his father, and “I’m happy!” said the Prince, exactly in unison. And then they both laughed.

“A memory,” said the King to the Queen a moment later. “From after that fighting up by Cyllene.”

“A good memory,” said the Prince.

“Oh,” the Queen said. “Well, that’s all right then…” Though the look in her eyes suggested that she’d be asking her husband more about this later.

The younger Prince Iaon smiled and finished blinking his eyes clear, then turned back to the fire and went on. “‘And saying that, Odysseus sat down / and Telemachus threw his arms around his father / and sobbed. They were both so desperate to let go…’”

By the doorway, the Prince tugged the God out into the hallway outside the chambers. “That was the context,” the Prince said as they walked away down the corridor toward the rear gallery that overlooked the Palace’s great hall. “You warned me such messages might be overheard. So I thought a bit about what to say… You see how for me and my father those verses got linked? Mention one set to either of us, we’ll automatically think of the other. But in this case…”

The Prince paused to lean on the stone railing of the gallery, looking down the length of the hall toward the hearth where he and the Lady Xanthe had sat. Now he looked up into the God’s eyes, tilted his head a little to one side. “The earlier lines, where Odysseus tells his son that the magic things that’ve been happening to him are an immortal’s doing? They don’t _just_ say that. That passage will have given my father and mother another message too. That though I may not be able to give them the details, they should know I’m not just alive, but happy. _Really_ happy, and sending them the message without duress.”

The God nodded slowly. “I see...” he said. “Thank you, Prince.”

The Prince squeezed his hand, let it fall. A moment later they were sitting by the hearth once more, and the Prince leaned back in his chair and sighed, and gazed into the fire. “I don’t know about you,” he said after a moment, “but I can’t remember when I last ate. And if _I_ can’t, you’re going to need something too…” He got up and wandered into the kitchen. “Ladies? That wild boar’s not all gone yet, is it?...”

The God sat gazing into the fire as well, while absently rubbing the hand the Prince had held. _Happy. He’s_ happy _…_

 _Well, you_ knew _that. Deduced it some time back!_ But why did it somehow make such a difference to be told? Because the Prince was right, somehow it _did_. …What also surprised the God, though, was how big a difference it made to him that the Prince _was_ happy. Indeed, somehow or other when the God wasn’t looking, that issue had quietly become one of very great importance.

 _When did this happen? Why didn’t I_ _even_ notice?

The question shortly became lost in post-case work and debriefing with Argeiphontês and the next case along. Yet every now and then in the days that followed the God thought again of that little boy’s straightening back and the sudden burn of the Prince’s eyes filling as he sat by his parents’ fire, and the hair went up on the back of his neck and his insides clenched with the intensity of those moments, even experienced second-hand as a memory of a memory. Finally one night when the Prince had gone to his couch, the God sat by their own fire for a good while and tried to reason it out. Yes, when he slipped into an average mortal’s mind to learn what they knew, their emotions were normally in play, but those never moved him like this. _It’s because it’s the Prince, perhaps,_ he thought. _Because the rules are different with him: because he invited me in, and so I felt what he felt._

Yet that seemed insufficient to explain the quiet turmoil inside him whenever he re-examined the memory. It seemed to the God that he was reacting, not merely to the emotions themselves, but to the fact that the Prince had willingly shared them with him: had let him in.

_Intimacy…_

There was a subject that wouldn’t have been on his agenda, normally: something that happened to a large sampling of both mortals and immortals, and routinely with adverse results. It was an option that he’d very early decided to give a pass—somewhere around the third week of his life—as initial feelers had proved unpromising.

For some while before the Consulting God appeared on the scene, births of full-blood Gods had been fairly rare in heaven. After the initial spurt of getting the pantheon established—when deities begat other deities as enthusiastically as if they had some kind of target to meet—the God-on-God action had scaled way back, and it was now unusual for there to be divine children on Olympus at all. So the new little God, though very clever and surrounded by what often seemed by a near-inexhaustible supply of the smartest and most beautiful Mummies anywhere, had nonetheless been very lonely because there was no one his own age to play with.

Buried far back in the God’s Palace of the Mind was a scarce-visited memory from way back when he was still a baby God (for about a day), sitting on the shining floor of Mummy Athena’s workshop and playing with the big colourful pieces of his Playskool “Li’l Creator” First DNA Kit, while babbling to himself as even Gods do when they’re tiny. _Someday I’ll have a friend, a special friend, and we’ll do everything together. He’ll be smart and strong and kind and he’ll know when I’m sad and he’ll hug me and I’ll hug him and then I won’t be sad any more. Why won’t the adenine go into the guanine, Mummy?..._

But within days the hope was already withering as the God swiftly grew, and other Gods, in the wake of his initial feats, began regarding him with confusion and dismay. Profoundly perceptive as he already was, he could feel their reactions, scalding hot, as if they were right under his skin. And when he started deducing, matters instantly got far worse. Who wants to be with someone who knows everything embarrassing about you just by looking, and then says those things out loud? Who’d even _dare_ to try getting close? Yes, his Mummies were close, well, they had to be, they were _mummies_ after all… but they didn’t understand him all that well either. The dream of someone like him who’d know him for real and not be afraid of him, someone who’d stay with him even when he sometimes did stupid things, or knew exactly how to talk to him to help him through fear or pain, was just that: a foolish childhood fantasy. He would have to find other ways not to be hurt.

Eventually, in the sheltering darkness that the God learned to draw around himself, he found one, forcibly wresting what had seemed a liability into a strength... at least from his point of view. No one could hurt him if he purposely set himself apart, allowed no one near. _Alone is what I will have. I will make Alone protect me._ And in the wake of this choice the baby-God hope of a forever friend was duly shoved away into a dark corner of the Palace of the Mind, and almost entirely forgotten.

So matters remained for a long while. But over recent weeks it had become plain that something was happening, some kind of shift… and that unnerved the God, for the Prince was involved. _Closeness._ _Not family-feeling, but closeness by choice._ He’d idly turned the concept over in his mind as if it was a dose of a drug, one that a potential user turns over in his hands, thinking _If I_ do _start using it, of course I can stop any time._ As an abstract it had held no terrors. But in concrete form it proved more problematic.

There came an evening when he and the Prince were sitting on the couch, more or less sprawled at opposite ends with their feet up on the glass table. The Prince was idly correcting a blog entry before sending it out with Westie the next morning, while the God amused himself with shouting abuse at the little oblong glass window; this was showing an utterly crap performance of the tale of the Seven Against Thebes (featuring no better than amateur-dramatics-level acting and truly terrible production values). It was at the point where the God had just pointed out how they were using the same horses over and over again in the battle sequence when the Prince looked over at him with the expression of a man who’s just remembered the one thing he _meant_ to get when he was down at the Tesko yesterday but hadn’t then been able to recall.

“What?” said the God.

“Just thought of something you never did get around to telling me.”

“We’re working with an awfully large data set here, my Prince,” the God said with a dry smile. “Pray help me out and narrow it down a little.”

“You never told me the whole story of why it was so important for me to stay here,” said the Prince.

And the God’s insides seized right up as if suddenly clenched in some terrible fist.

It wasn’t that he’d _purposely_ not told the Prince about this much sooner. Well, at least not after the first couple of weeks, when he wanted to give the man a decent interval to get settled in. And then the couple of weeks afterwards, because the Prince was becoming so useful, and _interesting_ , and there seemed no point in unduly disturbing matters. But then right after that they got so busy, and then later on the time just never seemed to be right to sit down and explain it all, there were always so many much more important things to discuss, and it got shelved… backburnered…

_Avoided. Avoided at all costs, because the last, the very last thing you want in all of Earth and Heaven, is for him to go._

But there was no avoiding it now, or the God would look as if he had purposely been postponing the discussion in hopes that the Prince would become so thoroughly and happily settled in the House of the Two Hundred Twenty-One Bees that the God’s imperatives would become more important to him than his family’s. _Which of course was true._

 _You can still save this. Alter a few details. Make it sound more dangerous than it was_ —

And instantly the God remembered how he’d felt when that blued-steel gaze had been trained on him before. _Not again. Never again._ It had been as bad in its way as the fear, the fear slowly filling him right now—of what the Prince might do when he finally heard the truth.

The Prince was looking at him with mild concern. He put his stylus down. “What’s the matter?”

There was no time… no time to do anything but tell him the truth.

So the God swallowed hard and did so, explaining his dread Godparents’ case to the Prince from first to last: from his Godmother’s presence in the Prince’s chair by the fire, to the days after Iaon’s removal from the earthly sphere. And though he tried to keep his voice steady and his demeanour calm, all through it the God was waiting for the terrible question: “You mean I can _never_ go home again?”—knowing he would have to explain that it was to keep Iaon safe, to keep him _alive_ , that surely it was more logical and reasonable to live in exile than to die. And every second was filled with the terror that regardless of all his explanations, the Prince would demand to go back, and the God _would have to let him go_ because it was impossible that he should refuse his Prince anything he really wanted, and anyway, he wasn’t in the business of holding prisoners, especially ones who he— _stop it, now, stop it!_ the God shouted at himself inside, in an wash of frustration and pain—

And it didn’t matter, because when the Prince realized the God would let him go the moment he asked, then he’d leave and go straight back to the family he missed and loved. Shortly thereafter Iaon would be dead—because Hades would realize there was no solving this case in any other way—and once again the God would have nothing but Alone to protect him for eternity. Except that protection would be worthless, for damage would already have been done from which he would never recover. He would go about the Work and do it well, as well as he could without his colleague, his blogger, his friend, without his steadfast bronze-girt soldier-Prince by his side: but it would never, _ever_ be the same—

Oblivious to all this, the Prince sat quiet with downcast eyes for what seemed like forever, while the God sat immobile with the limb-chaining chill of impending, unavoidable grief. And then the Prince said, sorrowfully but steadily, “Well, my family wouldn’t want me going back there either if it just meant Lord Hades was going to show right up on the Palace doorstep with his sword. And staying here would be as much to keep them safe as me, wouldn’t it? Don’t want Death’s attention drawn to them any more than it has to be.” The Prince sat silent a little while, then looked over into the God’s face with one of those half-smiles of his: sad and resigned around the edges, but not blaming the God. “Guess we’ll just have to make the best of it,” he said, and reached over and squeezed the God’s knee in an offhand way. Then he got up and went into the kitchen; and the next thing he said was, “Tea?”

The God sat there in something very like shock for long moments, hearing, over and over again, strangely, only one word: _We’ll._ And there was another of those touches, casual, reassuring, the affectionate gesture of someone who was _still_ not going away. And even though the sea-blue eyes were right now busy watching the kettle fill, still, for a blessed few moments, the cacophony of the God’s thoughts fell away long enough for the God to clearly hear the Prince’s heart telling itself, _So I was right: this_ is _home after all._ And though it was sad, his heart still smiled.

Still frozen, the God just sat there, seeing something he’d taken for granted from a completely new angle. _This has been my House… but until now, not really my home._ Yet it was now. Where his Prince lived, in this place, this time, this atmosphere of closeness: _this_ was his true home—this place never before complete until Iaon Dasosoarchëidês came to share it with him.

Slowly, then, a chain of reasoning unique in the Consulting God’s experience began to quietly link itself together in the shadows of his mind. Among the many qualities contributing to its uniqueness was that the God was afraid of it… sufficiently so that he had no intention of watching it too closely. So for the time being he purposely turned his attention away from it—simply telling himself he was glad to know the Prince was happy—and occupied himself with other business. And life in the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees went along very much as usual…

***

Until the night in the alley in Aegina’s seaport slums a little more than a month ago, when everything changed.

It was an interesting case, a _fascinating_ case, full of features to commend it— the inscribed electrum Crutch with its layers of cryptic meaning, the artfully sabotaged crime scenes, the plethora of clues left specifically to frustrate and misdirect. And the source of all these was not one of those pitiful tragic crooks who just sort of stumbles into murder, but the ugly twisted mind of a nasty repulsive mortal who was just begging to be shown his proper place in the great scheme of things—specifically, chained to the wall for twenty-to-life in an underground dungeon afflicted with chronic damp: which was right where the God planned to put him. It _stretched_ him, that case, and the God flared up to meet it and was on _fire_ in short order. The Prince was in best form, dry and sharp as a sheathed knife and an absolute Argus for noticing things; and the focus that marked their partnership at its best was with the God every minute as they set about dismantling the Egyptian drugs gang[³](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/32259686448/chapter-21-notes-and-links#drugs) that was using Aegina as its base, so that shortly even Hermes Argeiphontês was muttering “How are you _doing_ that?”

Until it all literally came apart: because _they_ had.

 _Why did we split up,_ why _did we do that, stupid,_ stupid _idea_ — The problem was that it had been _his_ idea, and it had seemed like such a good one at the time. Until the first accomplice the God had caught by himself down that slimy back alley behind the Gymnasium had actually giggled right in his face and said, “Doesn’t matter if you’ve got me! We knew you were coming, they sent me over here to get you out of the way while they grabbed your little friend.” The ratlike little man stared at him with the glazed, feral grin of someone addled into irrational fearlessness with one of the nastier versions of the poppy-drug, his boss’s stock in trade. “And the double-header’ll have its teeth in him right about now. Teach _you_ to meddle in what doesn’t concern you—”

The God’s guts seized with terror. Rumors of the gang leader’s status-symbol pet amphisboena had been floating around all through this case. Its bite would mean a dreadful lingering death from which not even Aesculapius himself could save a mortal… and the thought of having to sit by the Prince’s couch and watch the light fade inexorably out of his eyes went straight through the God like a spear. As it was, the mere sound of such a threat tempted the God to whip the Shadowcloak off and kill the thug with it outright—the sudden death he’d originally planned for that bear on the forest path, seemingly an age ago.

But it was far too kind a death for such scum, and besides, Argeiphontês hated it when he killed perps who might turn pantheon’s-evidence if given the chance. The God contented himself with lashing the thug viciously across the eyes with the Shadowcloak and leaving the man lying blind and dumb and painfully limb-bound in tightening cords of darkness on the stones. “Teach _them_ all you like,” he growled.

Then the God turned hastily away and squeezed his eyes shut, sweating in fear and forcing himself to hold still long enough to reconstruct in his mind the warren of alleys they’d been running through, so he could deduce where the druglord’s people would have caught the Prince. _Right out of the bottom of the agora, left, left again,_ (heart hammering desperately in his ears, Iaon, Iaon, _Iaon!_ —) _no, impossible,_ think _, left and then right and left, no more than one point one five stadia, the little marketplace, yes,_ go—!

The Cloak instantly wrapped itself round him and snatched the God out of that darkness, dumping him seconds later into a place with too much sound (laughter, nasty) and too much light for any night with only a low crescent moon in a walled-in place with no torches. Three men held a fourth—one on each side, one holding the struggling captive in a hammerlock from behind—and in front of them a fifth man, lean, hunched, in a dark kilt pleated in the Egyptian style, had most of his attention bent on the creature he held on a leash hooked to a harness around its body. The beast’s squat-legged body was the size of a mastiff’s, but no mastiff ever had a neck at each end, or the blunt broad head of a dwarf crocodile at the end of each neck, or eyes that were just blank blinding blazes of pale fire that lit every cracked stone of the blank walls around them and glanced wet gleams off every slimy pavior. Both sets of jaws were parted, hissing deafeningly—the one pointed in the God’s direction displaying six rows of fangs dripping venom, and the other one straining at the leash, its claws scrabbling at the cobbles as it reached and snapped for the disarmed and helpless Prince—

All this the God took in in no more than a breath by the awful light of the amphisboena’s eyes. Beyond its far head the Prince’s eyes flashed blue with rage and relief in that light as the God plunged across the square toward him. But on sight of the God the druglord hastily let go of the leash and barked a word of command, and the amphisboena, hissing with fury, broke free and made straight for the Prince—

 _“Iaon!”_ the God cried in horror, for there was no time for another transit and he was ten strides too far away and he was _too late,_ the amphisboena was right in front of Iaon and rearing its neck back to strike, the light of its eyes washing ghastly bright like deathly lightning over the Prince as the two men on either side of him panicked, let go of him and fled. And then the amphisboena struck—

—as the Prince, his arms now freed, grabbed the arm of the thug still holding him from behind and dropped to his knees, heaving the man right over his head and straight down onto the amphisboena’s. Confused and enraged, the beast twisted that head around and up and buried its fangs in the thug’s neck just where it met the shoulder. Amid the anguished shrieking that ensued, the Prince dove and rolled sideways for his sword, which one of his captors had thoughtfully dropped when they ran. The God was only a few paces away and skidding to a stop as the amphisboena’s other head whipped around, its blinding gaze locking onto him, and the creature lunged. There wasn’t even time for him to whip the Cloak around for a killing blow before the Prince, still rolling, swept his sword up at the amphisboena and sliced that head off close to the body without even getting up off the ground. As the head bounced to the cobbles and the light of its eyes went out, the Prince rolled to his feet, took hold of his sword two-handed and chopped down through the amphisboena’s other neck as well, leaving the second head still hanging onto the thug who was presently shredding the air with terminal screams of pain.

The Egyptian druglord was already halfway across the darkening square and making for the twisting warren of alleys beyond when the God caught up with him, seized him, spun him around, and punched him viciously in the throat. The man spun with the savage force of the blow and smashed down onto the filthy cobbles, choking and struggling for air. There above him the God stood for a moment, fists clenched and gasping for breath in utter enraged satisfaction, before turning to see the Prince come hurrying toward him. He reached out to grasp the God by the shoulder. “Are you all right?”

The God couldn’t breathe: all he could think of was how easily the screams rending the air behind him could have been Iaon’s. _Am_ I _all right, who cares about_ me _, what about_ you _, if that thing had_ — “Fine,” was all the God could get to come out of his mouth for the moment, and he actually had to bend over double with his hands on his thighs, fighting for breath.

The Prince rested a concerned hand on his back, bracing him. “Perfect timing,” he said, sounding grim but exhilarated as he glanced alertly around. “What about the other two?”

“Let Hermes’ idiot minions chase them,” the God gasped, straightening as he got a little of his breath back, “it’s all they’re good for. We’ve got the one we want.”

“Yeah,” the Prince said, staring down at the wheezing, choking man, and then back up at the God. “Are you sure you’re all right? You sound awful.” He took the God’s hand and turned it over in his own, feeling the fingers carefully for broken bones, and for once the God couldn’t even feel the usual shiver of suppressed desire through the tremors of rage that shook him. “Did you hurt yourself? You hit him pretty hard.”

The God laughed grimly and flexed the hand while doing his best to sound offhand. “Not nearly as hard as I’d’ve liked.”

The lighting made it harder than usual to evaluate the expression in the Prince’s eyes, but he was peering into the God’s shadow with his eyes slightly narrowed. Concern? Something else? No telling. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “How about we tie this one up and go after the others, and when we catch them before the Yarders do, which you know we will, you can do that again once or twice.”

“Capital idea,” the God said, _“let’s go.”_ And when the God had shadowbound the druglord hand and foot and throat to a nearby stanchion, he strode off in haste on the remaining thugs’ trail, terrified he might start saying any of the things he was thinking and just grateful for the sound of the Prince hurrying along beside him, breathing, still _breathing,_ blest be Destiny and the Fates regardless of all the nasty things he’d been thinking about them…

***

It was amazing how such moments could serve to crystallize out the real core of a problem.

 _I nearly got you killed,_ his brain kept shouting at the God all during the capture of the remaining suspects, all during the debrief with Argeiphontês. _My carelessness. My stupidity. My overconfidence. Nearly got you_ killed _._ And when it reflexively came up in the background, the thought _I’m Death’s Godson, for pity’s sake, why is the prospect of this one death so important to m_ e? suddenly seemed like the stupidest question ever asked by a theoretically sentient being.

Something momentous, something terrible, was heaving its way into existence in the back of the God’s mind as that deductive chain back in the shadows inexorably continued constructing itself. The God steadfastly turned his attention away from it, for he had far more important things to be thinking about right now. _This must never happen again. He must_ never _be left so defenceless again. How can this be put right, what must be done…?_

For the Prince’s sake the Consulting God kept up the pretence of satisfaction with the case’s solution until he could get him home the next afternoon; until he could at last see Iaon sitting in the left-hand chair again with his tea and his tablets and the breath still miraculously going in and out of his lungs. Then, when that sight had settled the God out of terror and into mere fury with himself, he set himself to _think._

The Prince wasn’t entirely unaware of what was going on inside the God, but his calm was in full force regardless: possibly even being held ready for his use _because_ of the God’s unsettled state… which would be so like him. The God laid himself open to that calm as best he could, willing to put up with the typical annoyance at _needing_ something from someone else, for this was important, far more important than his own freshly-abraded pride. And sure enough, before too long that singular state of relaxed yet incisive clarity welled up inside him, and the Prince spoke and the light leapt out from along his train of thought and the God looked down his sightline with him and there, _there_ it was: the propellant, the device, the structures and basic engineering needed to serve the purpose, the basic elements of the design—the whole project as ready to be born as if all it needed was for someone to hit him in the head with an axe.

The God fled the House moments later, swallowing away his own ironic laughter; for Hephaestus had been the original God with the Axe, and he was just the one who was needed now. The first quick consult resolved all the necessary issues: could the device be made (of course it could, this was Hephaestus we were talking about, the inventor of the _robot_[ 4](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/32259686448/chapter-21-notes-and-links#robot) for Heaven’s sake), what was needed (considerable precision work on the composition of the propellant), and how long, how _long?_ — because soon enough another case would come up and the God could not, _would_ not let the Prince out of his sight again without this thing which plainly had been intended for him since the beginning of time, if not earlier. Its presence would complete something vital that the God had never deduced was incomplete.

 _And how many other things of this sort have I missed?_ he thought as he stood outside Hephaestus’s workshop, looking down the mountain at the view toward the House, all alone by itself in its garden and its swath of greensward: like a little jewel-box nestled in velvet, with one precious gem held safe inside it.

 _Sentiment,_ the God thought, settling the Cloak about him (there was no keeping it on inside that workshop: the lightning-forge overheated the place dreadfully). Yet somehow the word didn’t have the sting about it that it usually had. Perhaps experiencing sentiment didn’t automatically make you sentimental, wasn’t necessarily the same thing… any more than being virginal necessarily meant you were a virgin.

The Consulting God took himself home and started work on the propellant. And as that following month went by, as the God’s temper worsened things and things repeatedly blew up in the kitchen, as minor cases came and went and the Prince looked at him sidewise and wondered what the hell was going on with him, the God kept worrying away at the question. _What else have I been missing?_

Matters of great importance, apparently. Things right under his nose. Things about his Prince.

Take _that_ , for example. When did Iaon Dasosarchëidês become “his” Prince, _his_ Iaon? The God couldn’t even remember, and he remembered almost everything. It had started as a casual form of address to match the Prince’s equally casual and sometimes gently mocking “my God”. Yet somewhere along the line it had deepened to mean something more important. Never _mine_ as in ownership, nothing so crass or ugly: but _mine_ as in partnership, in fellowship, in the desire to protect. It was the kind of _mine_ that he now realized actually meant _yours._ And now it seemed like it had been that way forever. He just hadn’t _noticed_.

As he hadn’t truly noticed the man’s beauty since he came: or had buried his consciousness of it. Oh, the surface layers of it, as he’d seen Iaon in the Palace, in kingly raiment—how finely made the Prince was, his easy soldierly stance, his winning smile, by turns grim or wry or gentle—anyone could have seen those, and he had more or less dismissed them. But what the God saw now ran so much deeper; ironic, since it had been “hidden” his favorite way, in plain sight, all along. That courage of Iaon’s, the foundation of his beauty, didn’t trouble to hide itself at all. It ran right out to the edges of him, wrote itself boldly on his skin in frown lines and laugh lines, made even his scars speak its name. It showed itself to you in his eyes, amused or exasperated or soft or blazing as the mood of the moment dictated; it told you his thoughts plainly and without fear, and let you see how he felt—that there was nothing he needed to hide. It made Iaon a terrible liar… but that was a poor small price to pay for everything else he was.

And he was a power. The God had trouble finding a paradigm that fit Iaon’s case perfectly, but the sea kept coming up for consideration, with its hard-to-sound depths and complex moods: sometimes calm, sometimes deadly, but always beautiful in its strength. Nor did it need to pose or brag or flaunt itself. It was just _there._ Iaon’s power was like that, and easy to miss at first—so often sealed away under a placid everyday surface, as liable to be dismissed at a glance or taken for granted as the sea might be when you lived by it all the time. But when you stepped away for a little and then came back again, or remembered where you were and held still long enough to see the light dance on it, hint at its depths… Then there was nothing to do but stand still as the unselfconscious sense of breadth and calm drew you out to meet it, and the mind’s roaring went quiet in _its_ quiet.

 _I saw, but I did not observe._ The most humiliating possible admission for him, but better made now than never. Because there was no _not_ observing the facts brutally brought home to the God in that square in Aegina. Now at last he recognised the truth about who this mortal actually was: not just his blogger and colleague and partner and very best friend, but the very embodiment of the way past the ever-menacing boredom, the one who knew how to cope with the God’s darker moods and understand him in situations where no one else had ever cared enough to keep trying…

 _This_ was the one whom a toddler-God had wished for while playing on Athena’s workshop floor. In normal times the Consulting God would hardly ever have thought of that memory. But now it was waiting for him in the darkness of his mind every time he closed his eyes to try to concentrate. Now he realized how many times, in his sleeps of deepest exhaustion, that old, old dream must have crept out of its dark corner in the Palace of the Mind and whispered to him, _Wait. Wait for him. Don’t give up: just bide your time. Someday he’ll turn up_ …

…the forever friend, the one who was always there for him, who knew his thoughts better than any other and wasn’t afraid of them, the true-hearted one. _True-hearted:_ the Prince might sometimes mock at the stock epithets, but _kednos_ _,_ that was the one that summed him up. The man had a heart, practically _was_ a heart…

…was perhaps _his_ heart.

It seemed almost beyond belief to the God that the one he’d spent his whole life so far awaiting had come at last. _…Almost_ beyond belief. But this wasn’t about belief. It was about the evidence, the data. The feelings growing in him, though they frightened him, _were still data._ He could no more ignore data than he could stop breathing, boring though that might be. And what analysis he was able to bring to bear on that data left him in little doubt of what it all meant, judging by the descriptions of the symptoms in the literature (which was extensive) and in the light of some previous, quite abstract discussions with his Mummy Aphrodite. Finally he was forced up against it. He was _feeling_ , and he knew what the feeling was.

The God had known in an abstract way that just as there were stages of grief, there were also stages of joy, and frequently the first stage of both was denial. But as he labored desperately over the finer points of the chemistry of the projectile propellant and the explosions in the kitchen slowly got smaller rather than bigger, the God grappled constantly with the concept in its most concrete form, while resisting the final admission of What He Was Feeling with all his might. The Work that took him and the Prince out of the House at intervals and the work that kept the God at the kitchen table day and night between times made it easier to push the whole subject away. But finally the propellant and his refined designs were ready for Hephaestus, and once they were delivered, two days ago now, he’d had no choice but to shut himself into his chamber and join battle with himself for the last time.

***

That first night of unrest the God spent with the source of the data slumbering peacefully upstairs while he desperately tried to find a way around his conclusions. His Palace of the Mind convulsed again and again from roof to basement as he forced it through all kinds of drastic structural changes, trying to retrofit it for a worldview in which the concept _The Consulting God_ and the phrase _is in love_ could coexist inside the same being. His terrible ambivalence about the very word made him throw his results out again and again, each time pushing the Palace through another paroxysm of fruitless redesign. The God just couldn’t get past Mykroft’s old oft-repeated reminder that caring was not an advantage, for love was caring of the most desperate sort. He was the Consulting God, and caring had _never_ been in his nature. It was weakness, it was folly, and whatever this was going on inside him, it couldn’t be… simply _couldn’t…!_

But early on his second day in the dark, the scientist in the God rose up in scornful rebellion at his pitiful last-ditch attempts to manipulate or cherrypick the data to suit his own preferences. A state of being that _existed_ , that was real and true, had a dignity all its own, like the Prince—one that should not be insulted by denial. Or rather, to deny it would be an act of intellectual dishonesty that ought rightly to shame the God to his core. To deny the logical conclusion to his deductions merely because it _frightened_ him was to deny the very source of his power. It would be fatal. More: it would be _wrong._

Finally, more or less beaten into submission by his loyalty to the truth, the God had no choice but to stop denying the facts about what was going on inside him. All he could do then was just try to hold on… to give himself time to get used to this terrifying new reality so alien to everything he’d believed about himself, and to find how he should behave in it. With this decision, an irrational fear came sweeping in: that merely naming what was so long denied and so long desired might somehow make it vanish. Or worse, that if the God dared to share the truth about his feelings with their source, that the other would say, ever so kindly but ever so regretfully, “This… this isn’t what I wanted. It’s all right, we can still be friends.” Or far worse: “…No. Perhaps I should go back. Maybe it would be best for both of us…”

That fear left the God half-paralyzed, afraid to be in his own House, equally afraid to be anywhere else. He had absolutely no idea what to do with himself. He didn’t go near the Prince for fear that Iaon would somehow read what was the matter with him at a single glance, and do… _something,_ something unexpected that the God wouldn’t be able to deduce in advance and that would shatter him. But he also couldn’t bear to stay in his chamber any more. He thought of going out to speak to the Bees, but he didn’t dare, because he wasn’t at all sure of what he ought to be saying to them. So instead, during one of the Prince’s several trips out of the House “for air” on that second day, the God slipped out of his chamber and into the sitting room: then went to the mantelpiece and took down the Skull.

What he’d intended to be a long, thoughtful, analytical discussion of the facts quickly degenerated into a rant. And much to the God’s surprise, the Skull, normally loquacious to the point of sesquipedalia once it had been addressed, was unusually taciturn during this discussion, to the point where the God put him back on the mantelpiece and spent nearly half an hour or so striding up and down the room, waving his arms and unburdening himself nonstop about the Prince, and what he’d had to do to the Palace of the Mind, and how nothing made any _sense_ any more. And finally, when he ran down, the God paused in front of the mantel and knocked on the top of the Skull, just about where his foramen magnum would once have been.

 _“Hello!”_ he shouted. “Anybody home? Anything to _say_ about all this?”

Those empty eye-sockets regarded him thoughtfully. _You’re actually ready to listen now?_

Its tone was so like the Prince’s that it brought the God up short and made him break out in a sweat again. “…Yes.”

 _Very well. Are you saying you_ don’t want _what’s happened?_

“…No.” The admission came so hard.

 _Good, because if you didn’t, you should never have let him in the door. But you did, and he stayed. Which means_ he _knows the journey he’s on, if_ you _don’t._

The God stared. “Journey? What are you talking about? I’m not going anywhere.”

_It would seem not, at the moment. You’ve been stuck on the Road of Trials for weeks now. Whereas he’s been waiting at the Threshold for a good long while. Or at the altar, depending on how you look at it. Either way, how long are you going to make him stand there?_

The God opened his mouth, closed it again. “You’re saying – _what_ are you saying?”

 _Monomyth_ _,_ said the Skull. _Seriously, with the people who homeschooled you,_ how _can you_ not _know monomyth? It’s in everything up here but the drinking water. Maybe that too._

The God stared some more. _Personally, I think he’s been very patient,_ the Skull said. _But then I guess it’s what you’d expect of a soulmate._

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous! How can _I_ be a mortal’s soulmate?” The God threw himself into the right-hand chair, where he wrapped his arms around his knees and folded himself into the smallest package possible. “We’re not even on the same level—”

_Are you saying that the Prince is not your equal?_

_“No!_ …I mean, yes, in the strictly existential sense, but in all the ways that _matter_ he’s— _”_

_So then._

“But Gods aren’t— _”_ The God waved his arms in complete frustration. “We’re not made for mortals! _They’re_ made for _us!”_

 _Are you_ quite _sure about that?_ the Skull said.

The God rested his forehead on his knees and said nothing for a while.

 _No one ever said the_ hieros gamos _was going to be easy,[ 5](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/32259686448/chapter-21-notes-and-links#hieros)_ the Skull said, much more gently. _Or simple. But the choice between this, and anything else… is no choice at all. For you, or him._

The Consulting God tilted his head back, blew out a long angry breath, and glared at the Skull. “Have you got any advice for me that’s _not_ entirely couched in jargon or riddles?”

 _Eliminate the impossible,_ said the Skull, _and what remains, no matter how improbable, must be true. …Even_ that.

The God put his head down against his knees again, and sighed: and the Skull said nothing more. Shortly, when the God heard the downstairs door of the House open, he leapt up and rushed into the kitchen to pretend he was checking on whether the Prince had made tea earlier. But minutes later, when one concerned look from the Prince told him that his pretence of normalcy wasn’t fooling Iaon at all, the God went hastily back into his chamber and shut the door. There he spent the next few hours sitting hunched on his couch like a shadow of the dream that had hidden small and silent inside him for so long.

In that darkness, in his last refuge, he now sat shaking again, understanding what must now come next. This was the only place in his home— _their_ home—in which the Prince had no part. That had to change. He must make it change. If he failed, his life would in some ways be over. Yet at the same time, he couldn’t imagine what his life would look like should he succeed. All the God could do now was wait for the solution of the one problem that really mattered, the issue of keeping his Prince safe and well and alive. Everything else, as it had been from the very beginning, was secondary to that.

And then the text from Hephaestus arrived.

***

In retrospect he could remember absolutely nothing of what he said to the Smith of the Gods when he turned up in his workshop to fetch the projectile engine. All his attention fixed instantly on the sleek and deadly thing Hephaestus placed in his hands. It was even handsomer than he’d expected, which was a bonus; but far more importantly, it also had about it that essential and ineffable solidity of an archetypal thing, something that has been _meaning_ to be brought into existence for someone. The God’s thought leapt instantly and eagerly to what the Prince would say when he saw it, what the Prince would do. Yet everything else was secondary to this: that his Iaon would now possess a truly unmatchable weapon, one that would make him safe from anything short of a God who was also invulnerable. The immense relief that descended on the Consulting God was like nothing he could remember having experienced before. _Safe. He’ll be safe now. That’s all that counts._

Minutes later, in the wake of some vague mention by Hephaestus that he’d send along more supplies for the weapon later on by way of one of his mechanical helpers, the God was back in his House without even remembering the details of how he’d left the Smith-God’s workshop. All his attention was fixed on the look in Iaon’s eyes as the Consulting God held the weapon out to him—the sudden glad surmise with which the Prince took it, the excitement in his eyes. Even the weapon’s firing didn’t have anything like as much impact on the God as the look on his Prince’s face when Iaon turned to him, half-stammering with thanks and praise that the God suddenly felt too abashed to receive, didn’t really want. _It doesn’t matter what I did,_ he wanted to say, _this isn’t about me, this is about_ you, _this is important for you, now you can be safe!_ All that counted was the delight on Iaon’s face, the way his eyes shone with unbelieving joy.

And then the Prince put his arms around the God, and drew him close, and kissed his mouth.

Everything… simply… _stopped._

Iaon was halfway down the seventeen stairs before the God could so much as move a muscle. This had not been like those shy touches, those casual squeezes or pats. This was something else. There was a roaring in the God’s ears that for once was not data. Right through his khiton and overrobe he could still feel the Prince’s hands on him, and his lips tingled and felt strange, as if they were someone else’s. _Perhaps they are now,_ he thought, completely irrationally, one shaking hand going up to touch them as if his body wanted to make sure they were still in place.

A few seconds later the Prince’s excitement found its way back into the God, even through the roaring in his ears and the trembling in his limbs. It took enough control of his body to run it down the stairs after the Prince and outside to where the testing of the weapon would begin. All the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening he hung onto Iaon’s jubilation as if it was a lifeline—the look of fierce fulfillment in the Prince’s eyes with every shot that went right, the eager way his muscles steeled themselves to cope with the weapon’s kick. Every move of the Prince’s shook the God with memories of how his kiss had felt, and the flash of Iaon’s triumphant grin and the narrowing of his eyes as he aimed at his targets ran up and down the God’s body in flushes of heat and cold that any other time would have made him wonder if he was coming down with something. But he knew, he _knew_ what he was coming down with now. And he kept catching himself shivering as if it _was_ a cold, as if it _was_ something that could have been prevented by remembering his cloak.

It was not.

Afternoon started giving way to evening and the Prince’s fierce delight in the gift never lessened, went far beyond anything the God could have hoped for. His exultation as he put the weapon through its paces out behind the House was palpable. And its behavior in the Prince’s hands, as if it was an extension of Iaon’s arm, a sudden perfect new _part_ of him, made it plain that the God’s initial assessment in Hephaestus’s workshop had been right. This was a creation that had been destined for Iaon since the start of things. _And_ no _one could have made this for him more perfectly than I,_ the God thought, briefly flushed with pride even through his interior unrest. _In this at least I’ve triumphed._ His deep, almost angry satisfaction in what he’d done was almost enough to distract the God from the vast yawning chasm of uncertainty that he knew lay waiting for him in his chamber as soon as he opened its door. _But that’s a long time from now, a forever of a time yet. This moment, this hour, is perfect. Stay here in it. Stay here with him._

And he was so glad to do that: so glad (a little later, when darkness fell and they finally went in) to sit in his chair on the right of the fire and watch the Prince, crosslegged on the floor, his eyes bound closed with the tie from the God’s dressing gown, deftly and methodically learning the weapon’s structure and teaching it with ever-increasing skill who its new master was. There was no hurry to get up, none at all: no need to rush away from the sight of the warm firelight catching in the Prince’s hair, or the sure quick way his hands worked with the weapon, certain and precise. _No rush at all,_ the God thought. For as soon as he got up he’d have to start thinking about what to do with himself next, and the darkness in his chamber would be waiting for him, silent, accusatory, filling entirely too full the one place in his life where this man was not.

Still, there was no missing how the Prince’s hands were slowing a little, and his shoulders were sagging a touch. _He’s tiring. He’s been at this pitch of excitement for hours. A break would do him good…_ The God had to laugh softly, though, at the smile on Iaon’s face, like a boy’s with a new toy; and under the binding of the soft silk belt, those eyes would be smiling too, he knew. _Let’s see._ “Prince, stop it now,” the God said. “Take a break, have some wine…”

“I suppose.” A sigh: the smile broadened.

The God reached down and unknotted the blue silk belt. As it slipped down off the Prince’s head and he caught it in his fingers, his hand chanced to brush against the Prince’s temple and feel the unexpected softness of his hair. At the touch of it, so silken against his fingers for all that it looked a bit rough, the God’s hand lingered a moment, shaking a little as something both gentle and unbearable, something he couldn’t identify, suddenly turned over and swelled warm inside his chest. The Prince’s face tilted up to him, Iaon’s eyes met his through the shadow—

And held them; held them as he _saw_ something.

Terror pierced the God like a spear. _Oh, no. He knows. He_ knows _now—_

_…It’s all over._

The God straightened up as if there was still something to live for, and headed into the kitchen, muttering some ridiculous twaddle or other about the wine’s vintage, about _food, I’m actually talking about food as if it’s_ important _right now, oh this is the end of everything and_ no _mistake,_ making conversation that was totally meaningless while his body busied itself looking for the wine glasses and pouring out wine for each of them and trying to look normal and _failing_ , failing so _totally_. He seized one glass and knocked back a slug of that noble vintage as if it was some cheap red backstreet retsina, then closed his eyes for a moment against the subtle burn to see if it would give his senses some distraction, some relief. It didn’t: a second later he was gasping again as he had back in the empty market square in Aegina. Terror gripped the God again as it had then—irrational grief for the warmth in his chest that would never have a chance to spread any further, for something he’d been trembling on the very edge of that was already coming to an end. _But I refuse to collapse in the face of it like a coward,_ the God thought. _I won’t dishonor him that way, as if all his courage has taught me nothing. I’ll stand up and meet what comes and keep it from hurting him, however that has to be done._

As the Prince came into the kitchen the God held out the other glass to him and drank his health and then hurriedly went on to discuss possible ramifications of the projectile engine, really big versions of it that might be made some day to throw seriously heavy versions of the basic slug— _oh, my Prince, already you won’t look at me, but no, wait, you_ are _looking, and what’s so funny, why are you smiling like that?_ “…depleted uranium would work very nicely, I suppose, but that’s an issue for another time, since one of your cultures is going to have to invent fission first. A much more immediate problem is what to call this thing, the name’s too clumsy really…”

…yet Iaon was still smiling at him and it was such a peculiar smile, a grin almost, and those eyes were dancing as if the Prince found something funny. Yet there was also a softness coming into his gaze as well, and at the sight of it the warmth inside the God’s chest irrationally flowered again even though there was no point in it, for it was doomed. _I don’t understand this, I’m not used to not understanding things and this is quite unacceptable, and— Wait. We’re holding hands. When did this happen? Why are we holding hands?_

 _Why am I_ caring _why we’re holding hands?_

—and Iaon was talking about kissing him, about _having_ kissed him actually. The God’s breath caught as the heat behind his breastbone faded into chill again. _No,_ he thought in desperation, _oh my Prince no you don’t have to leave just because you did that, you don’t ever have to do that again if you don’t want to,_ _just let everything be as it was and I promise I won’t ever,_ ever—

“We belong together,” the Prince said.

The God’s mouth fell open. Then he found he wasn’t holding his wine any more. Immediately after that he found that the Prince was holding both his hands in his own, and the warmth of them was as it had been on that first day, as if the sun was in them. And those eyes, the sea had _nothing_ like their depth, it was always an idiotic simile anyway, for what ocean from here to world’s end held anything in it to match the depth of this mortal’s soul?

“I was so alone,” Iaon was saying, “…and you’ve given me so much.” And there the God’s eyes actually began to sting as the Prince’s had in his memory, for he now realized this was what he’d been saying in the silence, in his own depths, without ever being able to find the right words. To hear it coming openly from the mortal who, _yes,_ just say the bloody word, go on, who he _loved,_ sent a pang of joy through the God so unbearably intense it felt like pain. Inside him his Palace of the Mind quaked from its foundations upwards, as if it was being unmade as he almost felt he was.

“Surely I can give you something, now. The one thing I have that’s mine alone: the thing that’s mine alone to give. Because you were waiting too…”

 _Oh, too great a gift, too great for the likes of me!_ the God thought, trapped in a body struck stock-still by sheer amazement as another wave of that staggering joy washed over him. _How should I deserve so mighty a gift, just because I waited?_ Yet he wanted this, wanted it so very much, for the sake of the dream, of the certainty that had lain hidden in his darkness for so long. For that little voice’s sake, that had been all alone but by some miracle didn’t have to be any more, he said it now: “Biding my time.” His voice could hardly make it out of his throat: it was hardly more than a whisper. “Knew you’d turn up.”

“No you didn’t,” the Prince said. The God was abashed to realize that Iaon _understood_ how the God had never dared trust mere hope over hard data. Yet this one scrap of hope had lain waiting at the core of him for all his life… and maybe, just maybe this was at last its hour.

“All the same, you waited,” said the Prince. “And here I am.”

And his Iaon smiled up into the Consulting God’s eyes, and waited one more time.

***

The God’s pulse thundered in his ears as it had in Aegina, but this time joy was mixed in equal parts with the fear, and there was no way to tell where one left off and the other began. _Iaon, Iaon,_ Iaon, _what do I do now? I don’t know what to_ do!

The admission was itself pain, as always when he didn’t know how to do something. But this pain was all tangled up with the Prince’s sweet closeness, his certainty, the strength and the warmth of his hands that were _not letting go_. He didn’t care that the God wasn’t omniscient.

Which was a good thing, as the God had never felt less omniscient in his life. _You knew what to do, last time, in the Palace. Oh, show me!_

He didn’t dare say it aloud, almost didn’t dare move. His eyes fell shut: he didn’t dare look. All he wanted was to be closer… even if it was just a _little_ closer, even if nothing else happened between them ever again. Trembling, the God let his head bow toward Iaon’s, ever so slowly. _Just a little closer still…_

And then a heart was beating strong and swift under his hands while another hand rested over them, and yet another hand was in his hair… softly cradling the back of his head… drawing him down.

Warm breath. Inside the shadow with him, unafraid, breathing the God’s breath with him. A scent from Iaon’s clothes of the day’s business, of wax and tea and fresh linen, that last a little blurred with the sweat-salt-musk of excitement after the evening they’d had; and from his skin, a hint of some warm and complex pungency, clean and sharp-edged like rosemary, in perfect harmony with the dark scent of weapon-smoke in his hair. _This, this closeness alone is worth anything,_ everything _, just let this last a while longer, a little while—_

—and then his lips. If the God had thought the touch of them in the Palace could not have been more moving, he now learned better… there no longer being any sense-dulling semblance in the way. The Prince’s mouth softly greeted his, touching it delicately; then courteously paused while the God was briefly submerged by another of those waves of unbelieving joy and desire. After a moment he recovered enough to at least begin to return the greeting.

Gently then Iaon’s mouth began teaching the God’s how it was now going to be treasured, in an entirely different way from Xanthe’s—in a way not based on a mere outward seeming and a scant day’s acquaintance, but on a deep warm understanding of the God that Iaon had apparently patiently garnered over many weeks, perhaps not even knowing at the time whether it could ever be shared. _I know you, and you are beautiful to me,_ Iaon was telling him, never even having seen his face in the light: _let me show you how that feels._

Feeling, having been held for so very long at a rigid arm’s length, was suddenly all the God seemed to have room for inside him. Thought seemed to have been washed away in one or another of the waves of delight that kept rolling over him, and somehow he couldn’t care. But thought would have had no power to teach him where to go from here anyway, so it didn’t matter, because moment by moment Iaon was teaching him—the slow soft invitation to passion, slipping in deep, pressing deeper, warm, insistent but gentle; then the withdrawal, shy, almost wistful, encouraging him to follow. There was no resisting the lovely temptation, the rhythm of it, the desire to be part of something so sweetly cyclic, like the sea sliding in and out—a neverending caress, each one like the one before it but each also beautifully unique. The God was learning how to do it, starting to learn how to enjoy it as Iaon did, to submerge himself willingly in the warmth that spilled over from each kiss. He hardly knew at what point he started to feel where the overspill was pooling, in the growing warmth deeper down, at the root of him… and not just his, but Iaon’s as well.

In the past the realization would have dismayed or annoyed him—transport getting out of hand, interfering with more important business. But now, with those lips on his, the joy simply washed over the God all the more intensely. _It’s not just me,_ not _just me wanting him; he wants me too…!_

The sheer intensity of sensation was increasing moment by moment, and through the swiftly-growing bliss the God managed to think, _If this is what mortal love does to immortals, then maybe some of the Gods’ idiocies make sense._ But he could feel logic deserting him again, except for one thought more: _The kitchen is no place for this. Time to make a choice._

It was, fortunately, already made.

He drew back a little, for he was going to need to be able to speak: and then sudden pain gripped inside the God’s chest as he opened his eyes to see Iaon’s lifted to his, full of confusion and worry. _No,_ he thought, _no, no, all wrong!_ But the Prince was already saying “I’m, uh. I, listen, it could be that I rushed this. Sorry, I’m so sorry, perhaps I should just—”

 _Oh, my Iaon—_ Gently the God freed one hand and just touched that dear mouth with it to stop the silly words; then laid his hand against the face looking up into his. “Just stay, my Prince,” he said, “for one thing more.”

Though a casual visitor might have thought that the next step was just a matter of walking down the hall past the bathroom and opening a door, the reality was by no means so simple. Nor was there any going back from what the God was about to do… but then he had no intention of going back, ever. As for the actual mechanics necessary, he had of course never done with any being what he now contemplated. But he was unquestioned master of his own power, and knew what would be required.

In the exercise of such power there was the chance that the Prince might see something dangerous for him to behold; so the God leaned in and kissed Iaon’s eyes closed, slipping his other hand up to cradle his head. _Now,_ he thought, calling his shadows to him from everywhere in the House as he bent to the Prince’s lips once more: _come. Learn to give him entry to our place; learn to know him as I know him, and guard him as you guard me._

The room went dim, then dark as night around them as the shadows flocked in to do their master’s bidding. The God slipped his arms down around Iaon, enfolded him, pressed him close. As the Prince’s arms came up to embrace him in return, the God felt Iaon’s heat and hardness pressing against him and gasped softly with it, distracted by delight and hunger. All round them the shadows shivered with uncertainty, but when the God got his breath back a little he smiled and coaxed the inward-crowding shadows back, though he too trembled. _Everything changes now,_ he said to the shadows, _but it’s all right. Bring us in._

A moment of hesitation, and then another moment of warmth pressing inward: a gasp from the Prince as he felt all along his body the strange warm touch of something that was not merely the embrace of a God’s arms. “It’s all right,” the God whispered into Iaon’s lips as the shadow surrounded him and stroked him, beginning to learn him, “just hold me a moment more—”

For a second the darkness pressed in around them, became total. Then it lessened until just the faintest light could be seen falling about the two of them, like starlight seen through heavy haze. Around them the shadows fell away to roil gently like dark cloud at about knee level.

For the moment the Prince was in no rush to stop kissing the God—perhaps understandably, in light of the growing, hardening heat each could feel the other pressing against him—and the God sighed and closed his eyes and sank into the sensations once more. But after a few seconds, or days, Iaon pulled away just a little. _“_ Hold you _just_ one more moment?” said the Prince, his voice a smile, though desire was showing through rough and warm under the humor as he glanced around at the surroundings, noticing one particular feature. “What makes you think I plan to let go of you any time soon now that we’re in a room that’s got a couch?”

The God’s breath caught again. “And there’s even a lock on the door,” he said, somehow managing a chuckle.

Iaon slipped his arms down around the God’s waist, plainly savouring the feeling of taut muscle under the long dark short-sleeved khiton the God was now wearing, and smiled up at him. “Better and better.” And then he paused, lifting a hand almost hesitantly to touch the God’s face once more. “Your shadow’s gone,” he breathed. “I can see you. More of you, anyway. And oh, you’re—” He swallowed. “Later. Where are we?”

“Inside the shadow,” said the God. “In my chamber. This is the heart of my power; my secret place. …And yours, now: if and when you will.”

Iaon looked around in the dimness, taking in the near wall, with its framed images of the Antikythera mechanism and the periodic table, and then looking toward the couch—dark, wide, soft—and past it. “It’s hardly bigger than my room, really. Except…” He paused. “It _is_ bigger, isn’t it? Much bigger.” And it was no surprise that he should say that, for the far wall was only partly there at the moment. The chamber itself was curious about the sudden profound change in its access permissions; and the Palace of the Mind, accessible through the shimmer of darker shadow on the far side, knew perfectly well that its master was anticipating the addition of a whole new level of experience.

The God swallowed hard. “Whether we were… whether or not we…” He stopped, started again. “Iaon, it was already past time for you to be welcome here. And so you are.” The God took a long breath. _“_ Of all beings in Heaven and Earth and the Underworld other than myself, only you may come here. But this one rule remains: this is my shadows’ safe place, too, and you must hold to your word. No light must ever enter.”

Iaon nodded, but he didn’t speak, and he didn’t take his hand away from the God’s face. “What do you mean,” he said, “‘whether or not we…?’ Are you trying to give me a chance to _back out?”_

The God could hardly breathe, hardly move, didn’t know where to look. “O my dear Prince,” he said. “I _know_ that, that…”

“I love you?” A flash of smile in the dimness. “Ta. Couldn’t recall if I’d mentioned.”

Once more the God felt that rush of joy wash over him. But behind it, even here, even now, came the fear. “Oh, Iaon, I know! But you have to, to _think_ before you say you’re sure. Think of all the ways this hasn’t worked between Gods and mortals before.”

The Prince’s back straightened, and he gently pulled the God closer against him. “Now you just _shut_ it!” Iaon said. “Of course I know all those stories. Laurel trees and sunflowers, and that poor bloke who caught a discus in the head… and a hundred others.” He snorted. “Idiots, mortal _and_ divine ones, who didn’t know what they were getting into. Or who lied to each other and then wondered why everything came apart.” He shook his head in disbelief. “God of mine, _we are not those hundred others.”_ He reached up to touch the God’s face once more, as if he simply couldn’t stop doing that. “We’re not just anybody, you and I. You are the world’s only Consulting God. And I’m your…”

“My Iaon.”

The Prince nodded once. “Yes I am. So let’s do this our way, and beat the odds… because it’s going to be fine. All of it; all just fine.”

The warmth, and the joy building inside the God again at the sight and sound and touch of this man, were once more becoming well-nigh unbearable. “Yes,” he said softly. “Let it be as you say.”

And suddenly the God became aware that something had quietly gone missing from his chamber. _Alone_ had fled.

“Good,” said Iaon. Once again he reached up to slip his fingers into the God’s hair and draw his face down to his own, and the God’s eyelids drifted closed in utter bliss while Iaon’s mouth once more said the most tender and exquisite things to him without speaking a single word. Slowly and sweetly that silent conversation grew more urgent, and the God trembled again as breath grew harder to find and his arousal grew moment by moment more heated and profound. Iaon too was gasping softly now into the God’s mouth, and those warm strong hands stroked downward, from neck to shoulders and down the God’s bare arms; then up again to rest on the soft darkness draping the God’s shoulders.

Iaon’s thumbs slipped down to where the collarbones showed bare above the low square neckline, stroking them gently. “Not exactly your usual daywear,” the Prince said eventually, when he found some breath.

“No,” said the God. “Nightwear.” His voice went low and rough. “…Shadow.”

“You went almost monosyllabic there,” the Prince said under his breath as his lips touched the soft spot just under the angle of the God’s jaw, and his teeth nipped it gently so that the God’s neck arched back. “Can’t be a good sign. Probably we should get that off you.”

“I was hoping… someone might do that,” the God murmured.

Iaon raised a hand to stroke the shadow away from the God’s shoulder. Soft as silk at first, soft as cloud after, it pushed away under his touch to begin with… then thinned like cloud and simply vanished, leaving that shoulder bare.

The God was happily astonished (and astonishingly aroused) by the way the Prince actually _groaned_ at the sight of the smooth bare skin, and squeezed his eyes shut as he leaned forward to rest his forehead against that shoulder. Slowly the back of Iaon’s hand stroked downward, smoothing the shadow away from that side of the God’s chest, and as the silken darkness slipped away, his breath fell warm across the God’s nipple. The God’s head rolled back, further this time, and his eyes fell shut, his lips parting to let a soft moan escape as the nipple went hard and everything else went far harder.

Gently Iaon’s hands strayed further downward, reaching around behind the God to pull them together even more closely than before. “I’m feeling,” said Iaon in a voice caught between a whisper and a growl, “…so overdressed.”

Somehow the God found strength enough to look down at Iaon again, to tighten his arms around him. “Then lie down over here and let me do something about that, my Prince,” said the God, his voice as soft and deep as if the night had been given not only voice, but at long last the power to speak its desire; “…my love.”

And they sank to the couch together, the God and the mortal man, and set about fulfilling the decrees of the Fates.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Maps, notes, and background info for Chapter 20](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/32259686448/chapter-21-notes-and-links) can be found at [the Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com)


	21. Of the God’s Chamber and What Befell Therein

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Consulting God and the Healer-Prince cross various thresholds, with predictable effects both inside and outside the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees (including but not limited to Notice being taken and money changing hands).
> 
> Warnings for physical and emotional intimacy, scones, the honoring of EU directives more in their breach than their observance, wet spots, Goddesses working late, invisible voyeurism, and Gods lying with mortals after the manner of man with man. (And, oh yes, Bees. Because, well, bees, that’s all.)

[In accordance with Article 8 of the European Convention on Human and Suprahuman Rights, especially those sections dealing with the right to respect for private and family life, some parts of this narrative have been redacted to avoid possible conflict with those provisions of Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament dealing with online data transmission. ( _Cf._ U. Kilkelly, _Le droit au respect de la vie privée et familiale…_ in the “Human and Suprahuman Rights Handbooks” series, DGHSR, Council of Europe, F-67075 Strasbourg Cedex, 2014 reprint edition.) Redacted material includes but is not necessarily limited to the true names of Gods, essential secrets of power and/or personal tabus, eschatological issues affecting other nonrelated panthei, and "trope spoilers" as per the _Arne-Thompson Folklore Motif-Index_ and similar resources. Nonredacted material includes but is not necessarily limited to: ejaculations (verbal or otherwise), descriptions of body parts (as distinct from those being used for vital forensic research), and sex.]

***

It was some time after that before either of them found breath again to say anything much, or indeed before their mouths were available for the kind of communication that involved words. The Prince, who had come down half-sitting on the edge of that broad soft couch with one leg folded up onto it, blinked in the dimness as he briefly let go of the God’s arms and they pulled a little apart. The God was half-sitting right next to him with one hand still cupping Iaon’s face and the other more or less yanking on the collar of his linen-canvas tunic—for there were no loops or ties down the front. Now he whispered in the most beautiful growl of combined laughter and frustration imaginable, “How does this come _off_ you?”

“Straight up,” the Prince said, smiling, while taking a moment to slip off the braided leather house-shoes he was wearing.

“Boring!”

“Well, if it’s so boring you should be able to get it right off, then.”

The only answer was an infuriated groan so thick with desire that the Prince’s neck hair stood up at the sound of it.

“Can’t you just send it away? The way you did with _your_ clothes?” The Prince leaned in and breathed softly on the God’s ear, catching the lobe between his teeth, nibbling it. “Which was cheating, by the way. Wanted to take care of those myself.”

“Not unless you don’t want to see this tunic again.”

“I have more of them.”

“That’s not what you said when I set the last one on fire.”

“Possibly because I was _in it_ at the time…!”

The God breathed out in frustration, turned his face back to Iaon’s and caught his lips in the beginning of another long sweet conjunction of mouth with mouth—this one so blood-heatingly marvelous that the Prince’s mind swam with it despite his best attempts to concentrate on giving his God his all. Each kiss was a more intense and immediate version of what he felt when the God’s hands touched him, wherever their flesh brushed: the response of mortal flesh to the touch of something immortal… either as something it longed to be itself, or perhaps simply as something it yearned to be in contact with, as men had yearned after communion with Gods for ages. _If this happens with just_ tongues… _dear Heaven, what’s it going to be like if we…when we…_

He gasped. _I don’t know if I can cope_ and I can’t wait…! “Here,” the Prince said, “let me—”

“No, no, _I_ want to…” The God’s hands, normally so sure and strong about anything they chose to do, were on the Prince’s belt now, actually fumbling and shaking with nerves and desire as they worked to get the belt’s tail end unknotted and pulled free of the metal loop. More than anything the Prince wanted to put his hands over the God’s and calm that trembling, yet he also loved the feel of that desperate eagerness, didn’t want it to stop for anything, it was too wonderful…

For the moment Iaon just concentrated on breathing, taking in where he was, steadying himself… insofar as that was possible. Below that belt, under his loinwrap, there was no chance of anything getting calmer: he was all one long hot pulse there. Iaon tried closing his eyes, but that didn’t help either. The warm dark scent of the God’s skin was too close, and besides that just the _feel_ of him, tentative and hungry both at once, it was so, so…

The Prince shook his head, trying to get a grip. It was like being a teenager again, but without the crippling uncertainties: or with almost all of them—the ones about one’s ability to function, anyway—long since sorted out and put away. The desperate joy of this, of knowing he could _have_ this, this wonderful thing that was going to happen, that was inexorably coming toward him, any moment now… _Breathe. Breathe._ The Prince tilted his head back, opened his eyes, looked up into that hazy, softly pulsing, hard-to-see not-quite-light above them. “There’s not even a ceiling in here, is there,” he whispered. “That really is cloud. And starshine.”

The belt came away at last, slipped out of the God’s grasp to fall away to the soft thick carpeting of the floor. “Yes,” the God said so softly the Prince could hardly hear it. “Shadow needs light to be born, to be seen. And it’s always starlight somewhere…”

Moments later those long graceful hands, still shaking with desire, came to rest one on each side of Iaon’s waist, and the dark head bowed itself down onto the Prince’s shoulder while the God’s chest swelled and sank and swelled again with breaths barely under control. Iaon slipped his arms up around the God and stroked down over those lean muscular shoulders for a moment, then up again, giving in to the urge he’d never before had opportunity to indulge: slipping both hands into that hair and through it, feeling the heavy silk of it curling and stroking against his fingers, irresistible…

The warmth of the God’s breath against his skin, the _feel_ of it… The Prince shivered all over. Every sense he owned was drowning in the sheer intensity of what was happening to him, and everything seemed to be happening preternaturally slowly… as if not only the way solid matter behaved but the way time ran was being altered here, forcing the senses into a deeper appreciation of every nuance, a near-painful acuity. For a moment the Prince wondered if this was what it was like sometimes for the God when he complained that there was “too much data.”

And then Iaon suddenly had a fresh superfluity of his own data to deal with as the God’s hands slipped down to the hem of his tunic and slid up inside it: brushing warmly over his thighs on the way (as all the skin there tingled in desperate anticipation at his touch) and up over the sides of his loinwrap and his hips and his flanks ( _no, back here,_ _back down_ _here please!_ cried everything presently swelling and straining for attention under the wrap) and resting warm again at his waist for a second (but skin to skin this time, oh _God_ …) and then stroking upward again, up his sides, thumbs brushing his chest… The Prince swallowed, closed his eyes, leaned back a bit and raised his arms to help as the God’s palms slid up him, satiny, warmth lingering where they passed, and pushed the tunic up and over his head and off.

Breath went out of the God as he dropped the tunic into the shadow roiling dark and warm against the floor, as his hands came back to rest on the Prince’s shoulders, stroking softly over them. Then his left hand spread itself out wide and warm between Iaon’s shoulderblades, and his right came down to gently cover the line of the spear-scar that lay ridged and knotted between shoulder-crest and collarbone. “Does it hurt?” he whispered, touching it so carefully with those long fingers, running them over it. “I don’t want to hurt you—”

The Prince shook his head, for the moment almost dumb with desire. “No,” he finally managed to say, his voice gone husky. “Hasn’t hurt much since I got here. Since you put my leg right.”

“Good. I hoped it wouldn’t.”

Oh, the gentleness of the hand on his back, stroking him there. And the slight scratchiness of the fingertips, _must be to do with his bowed lyre, the strings of it must be rough—_ “Did you do that for me too?” the Prince said. “The way you did with the dreams?”

The God shook his head, swallowed. “No. Most likely that just came of your life finding a new road to walk…“

“And someone to walk it with,” the Prince whispered.

“But if I could have, I would have. I’m sorry—”

Iaon gulped. “What _for?_ Because you’re not omnipotent or some such?” He shook his head in disbelief and took the God’s face between his hands, turned it up toward the starlight _. Oh, how long have I wanted to touch him this way… to see what I touch. Even so indistinctly._ It was ever so faint, the light that fell about them, yet not so much so that it didn’t still catch and gleam in the wide-pooled darkness of the eyes, glowing soft in the surrounding silver arcs that in this moment of shadow and desire were sliver-thin as the newest moon. What in brighter light would have been harsh shadowing of such sharp cheekbones was softened by the hazy starshine to a more obscure beauty. The shoulders spread angular and ashen in that faint radiance, but Iaon was seeing quite well enough by it now as he slid hands down to stroke the rest of the God’s shadow down off them and past them completely, leaving the lean torso bare to the small of the back. As the God gasped against him, that silken darkness slid down the front of him as well to pool in his lap.

Iaon took the long pale face between his hands again and leaned his forehead against the God’s. “You have _nothing_ to be sorry for,” he whispered, and it was his turn now to press lips against closed eyes. “Just being with you would have been worth this wound… many wounds. Aching or not. And if that spear-thrust brought me here to you, I bless it. Because just as you are, you’re a gift beyond any man’s deserving. Or any God’s either. So don’t you dare apologize for _anything.”_

He leaned in to kiss the God’s mouth again, losing himself in the other’s silent answer, the warm hungry depth of it. _And is it possible that it’s nothing to do with him being divine at all,_ the Prince thought, a little dazed, _the way I can’t think straight… the way I think I’m feeling him as much as I’m feeling me? Could it be just love that does this? For it’s my first time after all. Nothing before was ever, ever like this. Because this is_ him, _this is the one_...

As they kissed the God’s hands stroked down Iaon’s chest, lingered over the instantly tightening nipples, then slipped further down to his loins, over the soft linen there. The loinwrap was a habit left over from the Prince’s army days, and still sensible for working royalty who spent their days chasing Consulting Gods down dark alleys: soft but snug when properly wrapped, meant to protect a man who might have to run fast or ride hard at short notice. The God’s long fingers just brushed the front of the wrap, stroking over the hardness already pushing against it there… and if the Prince had thought most of his blood to be in residence in that part of him already, between that breath and the next he found out otherwise.

The Prince moaned at the touch, and now it was his turn to drop his head to the other’s shoulder and gasp for air. And then lips were brushing his cheek, and after that his ear, and “Iaon…?” said that voice, so deep and soft, as if warm Night itself spoke his name.

It was the dream, the dream come again. Though the fire was elsewhere, the shadow was here, holding him, _wanting_ him, and he was suddenly weak with it, trembling all over. “O God, _yes!”_

He felt the God’s hand press warm and hard along the length of him, felt him breathe out in a rush of hunger, and had never heard anything sweeter in his life: his own breath fled his lungs in sympathy with the sound. After a moment Iaon recovered enough breath to say, “Two ties. Front and back. Do the back one first…”

But the God was there ahead of him, his arms already sliding around the Prince’s waist, his hands touching the tie behind, resting there a moment. “Now these,” the God said in his ear, “you truly _do_ have plenty of. I’ve seen our laundry inventory.” Sudden mischief ran roughshod over the desire in his voice as his hands stroked slowly forward again. “And as I suspect if left in place much longer it might simply catch fire _without_ any help _—_ ”

At which point the loinwrap simply… subtracted itself from the equation somehow. Suddenly Iaon was sitting quite bare on that soft, soft couch, and in front of him matters suddenly became much more loose and comfortable… and also far more obvious, as his arousal, now free of any trammels, stood up for itself.

The Prince held still and just had to close his eyes for a moment, trying to master himself. One of the God’s hands slipped up to spread against the small of Iaon’s back, but the other, laid warm against his side, hesitated until the Prince opened his eyes again, looked into those dark ones: then downward.

The God reached down so slowly, as if toward something strange and precious and greatly desired. Then the long warm fingers were touching Iaon, sliding down to his root and wrapping around him, taking him in hand.

The Prince’s head tipped back and the breath went out of him in a soft moan. The hand he’d seen doing so many delicate and dangerous things in their work together was now squeezing him gently, stroking upward, testing and savouring the hardness of him. There was something deliciously experimental about it… _and in this situation,_ _how could there not be?_ he thought. Then Iaon’s breath caught as the God’s other hand slid down to cup him from beneath, fingers spreading around and upward to gently stroke his balls, learning their weightiness, the sac’s texture. Iaon licked his lips, swallowed. “All present and correct?” he whispered, for saying anything more loudly wasn’t in his power right then.

“Oh, present, very much so.” The God’s chuckle ran dark. “And as for correct… Certainly well in line with my deductions.” The word had never sounded quite so suggestive. “If not actually surpassing them.”

Iaon swallowed again, smiled. “Just the usual equipment.”

“Oh, my dear Iaon….” The voice dropped to a wicked, amused rumble. “False modesty serves _no_ one. It merely clouds one’s evaluation of the data.”

 _Only he could turn a sentence like that into couch-talk,_ the Prince thought. _That voice…!_ “Well then. As far as data goes…” Iaon breathed deep, looked down, and slowly reached down to the shadow draped about the God’s lean hips. Gently he brushed it aside and away to reveal what their earlier closeness had led him to suspect: in a nest of dark curls, a manhood lengthy and elegant with a slight, graceful upward curve. He stroked his fingers up along the sensitive underside, saw the God’s eyes close, heard him hiss out a breath of almost nervous delight. And his face changed; the slight naughtiness of just moments before slid away, replaced by something both more uncertain and more open.

After a few moments the God’s eyes opened again, and his gaze sought out the Prince’s. Iaon reached up to touch his face. “All right?” he said softly.

The God closed his eyes, turned to push his face into the Prince’s palm, kissed it, nodded.

“Should we perhaps stretch out?”

The God nodded again, eyes still closed. “Excellent notion.”

How anyone could sound both so formal and at the same time so tentative and so young, the Prince had no idea, and it simply melted him. He put his arms around the God and just held him close for a moment: then hitched himself up until he was all on the couch, and gently pulled the God after him so that they were both leaning face to face against the upsloping end of it, where dark soft pillows and cushions were spread for comfort in reclining. More or less leaning on his good shoulder he drew the God close again, stroking him gently, ribs to hips and back again, while trying to get his emotional bearings. The prickly side of the Consulting God, his frequent abruptness, his abrasive edge, the Prince knew more than well enough. But this vulnerability threatened to loose him from his moorings entirely.

“I’m all right,” the God said after a moment. “It’s _—_ ” He shook his head. “It takes some getting used to, my Prince. After such a long time…”

“Alone,” Iaon said. He swallowed; his throat had gone tight and he wasn’t sure for which of them the emotion was rising. “Not any more.”

“No,” the God said, and slipped his arms around Iaon, pulling him closer. “No, you are not.”

They spent some moments simply lying pressed together, looking at each other, hands moving over each other’s bodies. Turned away from the dim starlight now, the God’s eyes held a darkness deeper than any of his shadows, and they dwelt on Iaon with a gaze both like and unlike the fierce attention he bent on things while deducing them: far more intent in its way, but also softer, more like someone willing to be affected by what he sees. After a few seconds, though, the God glanced down and away, as if afraid he was showing too much of his thought. “Iaon _—_ ”

“Tell me.”

“You’ll have guessed that I’ve never done this before _…_ ”

“Well, neither have I.”

That glance went straight back to Iaon, completely thrown off track: indeed, astounded. “What??”

 _“With a God,”_ said the Prince. And he chuckled as he saw the God’s mouth recover from the shock and slowly start to curve up at the corners. “And my _first_ first time was such a while ago, and I was so young… I doubt _that_ data’s of much use. So we’ll be new at this together, shall we? Virginity comes in all shapes and sizes. And since it runs in your family to begin with…”

There was very little light to work with, but enough for Iaon to see more clearly than he ever had before the flash of teeth as the God smiled a smile fit to melt a man’s bones inside him, while also stiffening other parts up to compensate. _If it’s even possible for me to be more that way at the moment,_ he thought. _But this miracle’s happening, so why not others?_

The Prince looked down again at the waiting beauty that lay between his God’s legs, and slowly reached for it. But the God put out a hesitant hand, rested it on his wrist. “Wait _—_ ”

Iaon swallowed. “What?”

“Here.”

The God leaned over backwards, fumbling behind him in the direction of a small table by his side of the couch that the Prince hadn’t even noticed. A moment later he handed Iaon a small flat jar about the width of his palm, stoppered in cork.

The Prince took it, prised up the stopper. “And what’s this?”

“Beeswax and honey compounded with olive oil.”

Iaon dipped a fingertip in, rubbed a little between his fingers. “Oh, that’s very nice,” Iaon said as the aroma of the unguent floated up to him. As scents often will, it triggered memory, and suddenly he was sitting on the front doorstep again: a humming by his collar, the scent of warm wax and the glow of roses, a breath of south wind… though from the little pot’s contents he caught a tang, not of the roses’ blooms but of their foliage, dark green and faintly herbal. “But somehow I don’t think you’ve been using this for cuts and scrapes and softening callouses,” the Prince said, dipping a good double fingerful out and handing the God back the jar. “It’d be in the bathroom otherwise. Can it be that you’ve been… laying _hands_ on yourself, my God?”

A slow, shy smile in the dark as his couch-partner turned back to him. “A not unreasonable deduction from available facts.”

The Prince rubbed his hands together meditatively, feeling the slickness between them growing warm. “O _ho_. And how long has _this_ been going on?”

“…Some little while.”

He didn’t have to say _Since I arrived?_ He could feel it in the air. “And how did it feel?”

“Rather like…”

“This?”

“Ohh…” A silence. Then: _“Not that good.”_

“I could almost be glad. Because you cannot know… you cannot _possibly_ know… how much I’ve wished I might do this with you.”

“I _could_ have known…” A soft gasp. “But I promised… promised not to.”

“Yes. And about that, I _am_ glad. Because now I can do it and tell you how it feels. How much I thought about it… which seems like _all the time.”_ Iaon smiled as he stroked the God with warm slick hands, being careful not to miss anyplace vital, but not hurrying at all… for he was enjoying entirely too much the way the God was pushing himself into his hands, putting as much of himself as he possibly could in their way. “You’d drag yourself in here at the end of the day, falling asleep on your feet… and I’d wait until you were out of the way for an hour or so and then creep upstairs. Though sometimes I couldn’t even make it up there; I’d get so tired waiting for you to go to bed that I’d fall asleep in my chair.”

He laughed softly at himself. “But when I did make it up there… well.” The Prince let his voice drop, go conspiratorial. “I’ve always got a bit of oil left over after bathing and rubbing down, so I’ve got this little bottle tucked away, and I’d get it out, and I’d lie up there on my couch with just my little lamp lit in the middle of the night and think what I’d do if you’d ever turn to me and say, ‘Goodness, Prince Iaon, I feel such a dreadful itching in my privates, and nothing but my physician’s close attentions can possibly put it right.’”

Gasped laughter. “I would never have… _ohh_ _!_ Ohh…”

“Of course you wouldn’t have.” The Prince’s voice went soft, a little wistful. “I knew that. And obviously never _that_ way. But I used to think, _What if he ever… what if he caught me looking? What if he_ did _know? What if he just deduced it somehow? Because he might._ _And what if then one night he just got bored and thought,_ I need something to stop the noise in my head?” Iaon took a breath. “And then I’d imagine you lying there flopped down on the couch with that world-weary look, staring at the ceiling with your dressing-gown half askew, and I’d come in carrying a cup of tea and you’d tilt your head over at me and roll your eyes and say _Bored, I am so_ bored, _my Prince, you can’t_ possibly _imagine it, for Heaven’s sake don’t just stand there goggling, do something to_ surprise _me!_ And I’d say _Anything?_ And you’d say _You know I hate repeating myself, Prince,_ anything!” He took another deep breath or so. “And then… I’d put the tea down and I’d come over and kneel down by the couch _—_ and I’d _surprise_ you.”

His heart was pounding so hard that even hearing his own thoughts was a trial; and if possible, the eyes fixed on Iaon’s were now even darker than before. “And then I’d imagine… what I’d do. It would start with this.” He paused, looked down at what he was doing, feeling the sudden irrational need to confirm that this was really happening. “Just learning what you felt like, just touching, scenting, looking, because who knew, it might never happen again. And if I’ve learned anything from you, it’s that seeing, _remembering_ what you see, is so important…” Iaon had to stop for a second, as his voice caught in his throat. “But I couldn’t see, then. I could only imagine. There was no seeing what I see now. Or feeling how this feels.”

If his voice caught again, it was on his sudden naked adoration of what was happening under his hands and how he felt about the one he was touching. “Just the weight of you. So wonderful. And how perfectly you fit in my hand, like you were made for it. And how hard, how very _hard_ you are. And how perfect to touch. Just silk, stretched so tight, silk and steel. So _hot_.” He had to stop for a moment and get control of his breathing. “And how soft your hair is here, that’s ridiculous, how is it so soft? I want to run my fingers through that hair too. But later for that, because I can’t get enough of this, _this_ is too marvelous. You. Letting me do this.” He swallowed. “There has never been a better day or hour than this since the world began, because I love you _and_ you’re letting me do this. Not because you’re bored. But because…”

He stopped himself. _You’re babbling. And it’s for_ him _to say, what you want so much to hear, what you want to keep hearing. Don’t say it for him, let him say it in his own time—_ “Because here you are,” Iaon said at last, just stroking, stroking smooth and steady. “Here you are…”

The God closed his eyes, pulled a long shuddering breath in. “I thought about it too,” he said, that voice gone even deeper than usual, and husky. “ _—_ And not just here. The first day…”

“When? You mean _—_ ”

“In the Palace. By the fire. When you kissed me.” Another long, long breath. “I thought… “

Just hearing this was putting the Prince a little back in command of himself. “About me touching you like this?”

“Not just… just touching.” The God’s voice went even deeper, even softer.

 _Oh. Oh_ my…! “Mmm. Then perhaps you thought about me _kissing_ you here? Was that it?”

“Ah…”

The Prince knelt up on the couch a bit to make what he was anticipating a little easier. “Yes. And not just kissing, I think. How I might just very slowly slide this back...”

A gasp.

“And then…” Iaon bent over at the waist, bent down to let warm, moist breath flow over the area in question… and then bestowed the kiss, softly, just at the tip, where an early pearl of the essence of arousal was already trembling. His tongue slid forward just far enough to touch it, taste it; and at the taste his eyes slid closed, for he was briefly overcome. _Salt. That subtle bitter edge, like rue._ And something else, not a flavour or a texture, but something that said, _No mortal tastes like this. This is a God._ Your _God._

It took the sound the God made, a moan, almost inaudible, to pull the Prince out of the sublimity of the moment. As it trailed off and he managed to open his eyes again, Iaon broke the kiss, breathed out once more, long and slow and hot… then opened his mouth and slipped it further down.

The other shivered right down the length of his body and every muscle on him seemed to lock in place as Iaon’s mouth softly closed around the God, his tongue swirling around his mouthful in a sweet languid circle. _“Ohh…”_

And suddenly the God’s hands were in his hair and clutching the Prince’s head as if he was afraid it might take leave of his shoulders, and the God was moaning again, harder—

Then without warning he went quite still. A second later he pushed Iaon away. “Iaon—”

The Prince froze, his heart clenching inside him.

“No, no,” the God was saying, and his hands were stroking Iaon’s head, “no, it’s nothing you did! It’s not you, it’s me, it’s just too much, it’s—” He laughed, but the sound had that half-broken moan buried in it. “Too much too soon. If you do that now I’ll—” Less of a moan in the laughter, now. “Be far too brief right now to do you justice. Maybe we could try something less… intense. But… later?” And long fingers were stroking his face, gentle but very urgent. “If you can wait?”

The dreadful tension in Iaon’s chest began to ease, and he breathed, and then smiled, and finally he chuckled. “Wait?” Iaon said, and he took one of the hands that had been touching his face and kissed it as he stretched out beside the God again. “Too bloody right I can. I’ve been trained by a master.” He found the God’s hand a resting-spot on his waist and reached out to stroke the God’s chest, slid fingers over a nipple to watch it crinkle tight. “Think of all those cold dark alleys we’ve crouched in together for hours, waiting for some crook to come by. Remember that drippy culvert in Elis where we sat still so long that the rats mistook us for infrastructure and started running over our feet? _”_ The Prince grinned. “If I can wait through that… then _this_ doesn’t signify.” He reached up to stroke one of those shadowy cheekbones. “Don’t think I’ll need to wait long, though. You’re the Consulting God, and there’s never been a quicker study than you at anything.”

The God dropped his gaze, opened his mouth. “No apologies,” the Prince said. “I told you.”

Hungry-eyed, the God looked up at him again, then nodded and said, very low, “All right.”

Iaon nodded back once and let his hand fall back to the original area of interest. He stroked the God there again, from root to tip, making him gasp, loving the sound of it. “We’ll get to what you were imagining, I promise you. I love doing that, and I’ll love doing it to _you_ even more. I’ll be _hours_ over it.” And he grinned, for he meant it. “But meanwhile… shall we try something else?”

The Prince reached out and did something else he’d often wished to do: took the God’s hands and spent a few moments just massaging them gently with his own, rubbing the backs of them and between the knuckles, stroking each of the long beautiful fingers and working down between them, passing the God his share of the unguent in the process. Slightly to Iaon’s surprise while he was about this the God closed his eyes again and let his head fall back, making a long low sound deep in his throat that was more like a big cat’s purr than anything else. _But why not?_ Iaon thought. He was so used to thinking of those hands as quick and strong and hypercompetent, but they were always getting singed or scorched while experimenting on things, or scraped or cut while the two of them were out on cases: sometimes they must just get tired, sometimes they had to just ache with overuse. _There’s something to do for him every now and then, just for its own sake. But for the moment—_

He guided the God’s hands down to his own manhood, felt them curl hungrily around it, sucked in a breath as they began to stroke in their turn, slipping beautifully against his heat. “Now then,” he said, and tucked himself in a little closer to the God until their two cocks lay side by side; a close match for length, the God’s just a bit longer and flushed darker, his just a bit thicker and paler and longer in the head. He held them together, laced his fingers through the God’s, began slowly stroking as his fingers wrapped around to enclose both of them, and concentrated on keeping it even and smooth, even though the feeling of the God pressed hard against him all up and down their bodies, and here as well, was so distracting and intense. “Feel how that is,” the Prince whispered. “Side by side like that.” And then to his own surprise he had to gulp and catch his breath. “Oh, that’s really very good...”

“Always next to me,” the God said softly as he watched them stroking together, fingers slipping against each other’s, the long pale ones laced together with the shorter ones, more tan. “Always by my side. How did it take me so long to see?”

Very gradually the pace began to pick up; and if the Prince had begun by guiding it, there was no way to be sure that was still how things were going, for the God was indeed so quick a study, as sharp at deducing what was working for Iaon as at knowing what felt good for himself. “I was no better,” Iaon breathed. “It should have been obvious…”

“Obvious,” the God murmured as he gripped, as he stroked. “But it doesn’t matter. Not any more. You’re here now.”

“Both of us,” the Prince said. Things were beginning to speed up, and his breath was coming harder. “We’re both—right where we ought to be.” The sensations were building all through him, the anticipation rising… but there was so much more to this than just the physical hunger. Iaon couldn’t tell which was more unbearable, the heat of their closeness, the perfect rhythm of it, or the knowledge that the hand wrapped around him so tightly, working him so sweetly, so fiercely, was that of his friend, his God, the one he loved. _So good. Going to happen. So soon now._

The God was gasping, his eyes squeezed shut for a few moments. “This is…”

“So amazing—” The Prince was having more and more trouble finding breath. All the midnight desires suddenly coming true, all the unspoken hopes and hungers suddenly being satisfied as new ones rose behind them, the impossible joy of everything suddenly becoming _possible—_

“You are, Iaon.” And the dark eyes open again, locked on his. “You always say it. But it’s not just me. It’s you—”

“Oh, my God—”

“Always you. From the very start—”

Faster. Faster now, harder. The slickness, the heat, the closeness, becoming so hard to cope with, _too much data, yes,_ but it was good, beyond good—

“—fantastic. Always—” The God was constantly gasping now, but his eyes stayed locked with Iaon’s as all the sensations kept building, inexorable, and the world started to blur at the edges. The blood was already pounding in Iaon’s ears when with a shock he felt himself suddenly get much, much closer, started to feel what was happening almost as if from _inside_ the feelings of the one who was touching him, not tightly controlled and hidden for a change, but gladly revealed—urging him onward, _wanting_ him to feel _this_ , this hunger assuaged, this desire fulfilled, because it would give _him_ as much joy as it gave Iaon. That, _that_ was the impossible thing, longed-for through so many empty nights before he came here and so many hungry nights since—

—all of it turning from fantasy to reality at long last, the dream coming true in his flesh and his blood and in his heart, and for the other too, all of it unbelievably _happening_ , happening _now_ —

“—my Iaon, yes, you _know_ , oh, you feel it, Iaon, yes, _Iaon!—”_

“—oh, my God, yes, please, _yes, oh God now—”_

And then he felt his hands go slicker still and the blinding rush of hot wetness simply came blasting out of him in pulse after shuddering pulse as the pleasure struck him through like a glad but violent lightning, vision forsaking him no matter how much he wanted to keep it to see the God’s face, his body shaken by the climax as if he was some small weak prey in its jaws, and then dropped, breathless, helpless with pleasure and its release. Iaon collapsed forward, panting, as he could feel the God doing as well. His throat actually felt a little raw from the shout he must just have let out… not that he’d been all that able to hear it through what had just happened.

He lay gasping for many moments more before he could manage to pry his eyes open again. The God lay right beside him with his body still pressed close to Iaon’s but his head angled up and back while he too panted, chest heaving, and he was wearing what in that starry dimness looked like an expression of utterly shattered wonder. His hands were still clasped with Iaon’s, and the wetness of their commingled spill was absolutely everywhere; hands, bellies, chests… And probably further up too. _That was…_ The Prince would have giggled if he’d had the strength. _Simply amazing._

…He couldn’t move just yet; his muscles seemed to have no inclination to do anything his brain might suggest. The God’s head tilted back over toward him, though, as his breathing steadied, and as their eyes met again the God’s mouth curved in a small smile of such unspeakable fulfillment and delight that Iaon found it as hard to look at as the sun. Yet he couldn’t look away. _If it turns out I can be blinded in his shadows, then it’s the blindness I’d choose. And the sooner I get used to it the better, because I want more of this, there’ll_ never _be enough of this, of him,_ never…

“Iaon,” the God said, just a dark whisper in the greater darkness. He at least was able to move, for gently he disentangled his hands, slipping them around Iaon’s back and pulling him nearer, if that was indeed possible; and then he just held him, held him. “Oh, my love…”

Iaon closed his eyes again in utter joy at the rush of heat the words ran down his veins, at the feeling of the soft hair against his face and of the warm cheek laid against his, a touch of stubble coming up there now. “Yes,” was about all he could think of to say. After a few moments it seemed to him that he might possibly get his musculature to work a little bit, enough at least to put his own arms around the God and hold him tight.

Though even here, after a moment, the state of his hands and the skin between his and the God’s middles suggested that these would shortly need attention. And though it hadn’t yet had time to cool beneath them, there would shortly be a truly epic wet spot to deal with. “Do you have something to clean up with?” Iaon murmured into the God’s neck.

Behind him he could feel one of the God’s hands let go of him a little and the fingers wave in the air in a gesture of utter unconcern. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Why not? Unless… Tell me your couch is magic somehow, and doesn’t need to be cleaned up?”

“Cleaned? Never had that kind of problem with the couch,” the God said, sounding extremely relaxed and utterly unconcerned.

“Because you’re incredibly careful, or because it just goes away somehow?”

“I’m always incredibly careful.” The Prince couldn’t do anything but splutter with laughter at this outrageous fib, though not nearly as hard as he might have. “But I’m not sure. It’s just…” The God waved his hand again. “Not an issue.”

”There weren’t even really bed linens when we came in, were there,” the Prince said, musing. “I don’t recall even seeing a throw, or a blanket. What do you use when you start feeling chilly?”

“Oh. This.” The God rolled over on his back again and reached down beside the couch into the layer of shadow that was still hovering a foot or so above floor level. He grabbed a fistful of this, then pulled it up. To the Prince’s surprise it followed the pull, seeming as it reached the couch’s level to widen out into a broad swath of the same kind of silky darkness that had made up the God’s “nightwear”. The God gave it an energetic tug and it spread and flowed out over the two of them, billowing as the lightest, softest silk or silk-muslin might have, then settling down atop them. It was weightless as a cloud, but beautifully warm, and Iaon stroked it over his skin and shivered with pleasure, for it had something of the God’s touch in it.

“Mmm,” Iaon said. “Nice. But we’ll still need something to clean ourselves up with…”

“Use the shadow.”

“That’s our _blanket_ , my God.”

“It won’t matter,” the God mumbled into one of the pillows as he flopped over onto it.

The Prince shook his head, amused. “All right, now I’m actually missing my wrap. I knew where I stood with that.”

“So did I,” the God said, and began to snicker evilly into the pillow.

He had an incredibly wicked laugh when he got started: it was contagious, and after a few moments of it the Prince couldn’t do much but roll over and spend a few moments laughing at the joke himself, and then at the ceiling, or rather at where the ceiling ought to have been. It seemed to him that the haze was just a touch thinner: it was almost possible to see what might have been individual stars, though they were still incredibly faint and blurred. _Is that the Milky Way, though? It’s brighter than the single stars, somehow. Interesting._

But he was feeling stickier by the moment. Iaon sighed. “Use the shadow, he says. All right, fine…” He took hold of a corner of the soft dark covering and wiped his hands against it experimentally, then rubbed them together to test the results.

“Huh,” he said. His hands were dry, and as clean as if he’d washed first. “How does it do that?”

“Mmmnhh?”

“How’s it do that, my God?”

“Magic,” said that beautiful voice into the pillow, half-muffled.

Iaon gave him a very amused look. “No explanation with big words? Goodness.” He grinned. “You really _must_ have enjoyed that.”

The God snorted into the pillow, then levered himself up out of it just a bit on his elbows. “I see we’ve passed through the ‘fishing for compliments’ stage and moved on to ‘smugness,’ my Prince.”

“Believe me, you’ll know my smugness when you hit it, my love,” Iaon said, rolling over and reaching out to stroke up and down the God’s back. “I’ve barely begun.” And he blinked. _No wet spot…_

The God was chuckling again. “That’s as may be, but your personal marksmanship isn’t quite what it is with the bow or your new weapon.” He was looking up crosseyed at his fringe, both scowling and smiling at the same time. “You’ve got yourself in my _hair.”_

“I wouldn’t be so sure that’s me. Look up there above the pillows. I‘m sure _I_ wasn’t pointing that way.”

“Wishful thinking, Iaon. We were both pointing in more or less the same direction.” The God’s face suddenly came alive with that familiar expression of a challenge perceived. “There are of course tests—”

“Don’t even _think_ about it,” Iaon said. He reached down and rubbed the shadow against his middle, and once again it performed as promised, even (with a little extra effort) cleaning up his privates without overly troubling them at what would normally be a most oversensitive stage. “This is neither the time nor the place.”

“Oh indeed! It wasn’t _I_ who first introduced the Work into this scenario. You have a unique line in pillowtalk, my Prince.” The God chuckled. “‘Rats.’”

“That’s because I am the long-destined lover of the Consulting God,” Iaon said softly as he rolled back over toward the God, “who’s unique in every possible way. Including what kind of pillowtalk he can handle without even breaking stride.”

The God’s jocularity gentled somewhat at that. For a few moments he lay there with the starshine in his eyes, looking at Iaon as if he’d never really seen him before. It was breathtaking. “But you are,” he said, and the words were almost inaudible. “That’s absolutely what you are. It’s just— I never thought—” And a breath later he was cuddled close to Iaon and was burying his face in the sparse hair of his chest. “…I pushed the very idea so far away whenever it came up. It seemed so impossible.”

“Yet you kept faith,” Iaon said softly. “Just as I did. But I suppose this is where the waiting comes in. When it pays off…” He shook his head, smiled, slipped his near hand into the God’s hair again. “It’s so very much worth it.”

The God nodded against him, then turned his face so that one cheek was against the Prince’s chest and he was looking up at him, a bit heavy-lidded but intent. “…What comes next?”

“A hundred things,” the Prince said, smiling at the God, reaching over to stroke the upturned cheek in the starlight. “Everything. Anything you want…. everything we can think of that we both desire. No need to rush.”

“I want you closer,” the God said. “I want you as close to me as you can be. However we do that.” And though there was a shy note to the words, there was a hunger in the God’s eyes that went straight to Iaon’s heart _—_ and then shot further south.

The Prince shivered all over with delight… then nodded, slid downward a little to bring their faces nearer, and kissed the God again. “I know some ways we might try, when we’ve recovered a bit. I need to sleep a little. Who knows, even you might. But when we’re both up to speed again…how does this sound?”

And he began to whisper into his lover’s ear…

***

Some ways up Mount Olympus, in one of the eastward-facing palaces, a tall slender goddess with long dark hair severely braided back away from her face, and her robe’s sleeves rolled well up above her elbows, sat bent over a workbench on a high stool, working late. She was peering through a large round bracket-held self-illuminating magnifier at a tiny device of cams and cogs, and poking around in its innards with a pair of long tweezers. Seconds later she came up with a tiny jeweled gear no bigger than a ladybird.

She held it under the magnifier and looked narrowly at it, finally seeing something she’d expected: the gear had a single broken tooth. At the sight of it the Goddess let out an angry breath and said quite a bad word in Aeolian. At the same moment, off to one side of the workbench, a small device vibrated against the tool-scattered surface, and then sang in a warm choral FM-radio sting: “Aphrodite, Aphrodite, Aphrodiiiiiiteeeee… _THE GODDESS OF LOVE!”_

The Goddess at the workbench rolled her eyes. “At _this_ hour?” she said under her breath as she carefully put the offending gear down flat on the work surface. Then she reached out to the mobile, touching its speakerphone button. “Not the best moment, Kypris. What’s up?”

“You owe me ten drachmae,” said the voice at the other end.

Athena’s eyes went wide and she dropped the tweezers.

***

Further up the mountain, on the western side, in what would have appeared to be nothing more than a downstairs annex to Zeus’s main palace, a tall auburn-haired God in a charcoal-grey khiton and a divided overrobe three shades darker sat behind a wide shining black-marble desk cluttered with parchments and codices and tablet-frames full of minuscule and intricate notations, doing his start-of-business-day reading. He had just rolled up and pushed away a codex and was in the act of reaching for a clean tablet when he paused, his eyes widening a bit, and gazed off into space. It was an expression that might have been taken by his employer (or indeed any other incompletely-informed deity) as a loss of focus, but which was actually a herald of something far more subtle and potentially dangerous.

The God’s brows indented themselves for a moment into a single vertical frown-line of surprise: then relaxed. The expressive eyebrows went up, then resettled themselves into a more neutral position as the door to the outer office opened and a dark-robed, dark-haired woman with the pale complexion of an oread from above the treeline stepped in. “Something, sir?”

It was her business to be this acute, but this was one of the very few moments he wished she hadn’t caught his moment of disruption. In the meantime, it was important to be prepared for anything unexpected that might happen, though his analysis of the situation so far suggested that any truly untoward events were unlikely, at least in the short term. “Anthea,” said Mykroft, “no calls for the rest of the day, and clear my afternoon schedule.”

“And if Himself upstairs calls?”

“Oh, him, yes, of course put him through, but I’m not expecting anything from that direction. After this morning’s sitrep he went off into a great song and dance about stress and announced he’s going off on holiday. Another of the Æthiopians’ marathon all-you-can-eat sacrifices.” Mykroft’s slight delicate sneer was more or less inevitable: holidays were nice for those who didn’t have any serious work to do, but not an extravagance in which he was likely to indulge himself any time soon. “Still, it’s an ill wind, _et cetera._ We’ll have a fortnight’s blessed peace before he’s back here complaining about the state of his liver and demanding a spa holiday and a detox.”

The oread didn’t react, that not really being part of her remit anyway. But reaction would have been superfluous, Mykroft’s own deductions having long since reassured him that as regarded the habits of the upper echelons of Olympian management structure, the two of them were very much on the same side of the tablet. “As regards this schedule change, sir,” Anthea said, “will you be needing transport? Shall I have the chariot brought around?”

“No,” Mykroft said, “no need. Thank you.” Though it wasn’t until she’d stepped out again and shut the door behind her, and he was gazing out the western window, that the God of Bureaucracy murmured, “No, I’d say that for today the issue of transport is well and truly handled.” And the smile that edged out then onto his face, if a touch wintry, was nonetheless quite genuine.

***

In the kitchen on the ground-floor level of the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees, Mrs. Hudson cocked an ear – the soundproofing in some parts of the house wasn’t always entirely what one might desire, and in the part in question, hadn’t ever really been tested – and got up to turn the oven on. In a while someone would be wanting something to help keep their strength up, something that could just be left outside the door, with some tea. And whatever her personal opinions on the subject might be, one of them really deserved to have currants in his scones.

***

Elsewhere, in a room of the House that to the uneducated viewer might have looked empty – a room where the soundproofing _was_ far better, because one or more of them had stood over the subcontractors the whole time -- the Thalastrae sat together around what remained of their third bottle of champagne.

There was a wide range of responses in the break room to what they knew perfectly well was going on upstairs. (They did not have access to the Chamber, but it was in the nature of the House to keep them informed in a general way of everything happening inside its walls, and so of course they knew.) A few of them – the ones who had always had something of a crush on the God -- were wiping away a tear or two of mixed emotion, sad that they were officially out of the running but happy that the God was so happy. A few others were saying “Awwwww…!” repeatedly (or fanning themselves in histrionic delight) as they reviewed the events that had transpired in the kitchen. Still others, considering the possibilities of what was now ensuing in the chamber, were covering their mouths and trying to stifle rather wicked and affectionately prurient giggles, with very mixed success.

Another bottle went _pop!_ , and amid the clinking of glasses, the giggling began to prevail.

***

Outside in the garden, as dawn broke and their work day began, two hundred and twenty Bees – all out among the opening roses much earlier than usual -- began to hum two notes in the Phrygian mode, constructing a long, slow two-voiced fugue: one note always in the highest part of the baritone range, and one always in the lowest part of the tenor, the second note always a natural third or fourth higher than the first. All day in shifts they built the fugue whilst the roses opened, wandering from flower to flower while the composition followed them, contrapuntally, sliding up- and down-stave from height to depth to height again, the two voices repeatedly parting company but always once more swinging back together, until the fugue began to run its course. Softly and gradually the rhythm slowed, the baritone and tenor lines steadily drawing closer together in the lengthening afternoon light. Finally they resolved into a simple sixth, two notes lying still, side by side together, all along the warm sunset air; until with twilight the fugue was done, and the hum of wings withdrew from the garden, silence falling again.

The two hundred and twenty-first Bee, alone in the hive for a little while just after that dawn, paused in her egg-laying to hold still and gaze for a bit, as she did each day, into the future. On what she saw, the Queen piped softly to herself (as even mortal Queens may do under stress) and accepted what must now unfailingly come. And as the first of her retinue returned to assist her in the normal day’s routine, the Queen began seriously considering the hexagonal-pattern numbers as they relate to high-packing events and the Diophantine equations for primes.

***

And in the House’s inmost chamber, unconcerned by all else, tangled together and wrapped in shadow, a God and a mortal for the first time slept together in unfading starlight, enfolded in one another’s arms and (even in their sleep) fulfilling one another’s dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes and links pertaining to Chapter 21 can be found at [The Lotus Room](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/32780789363/chapter-22-notes-and-links) blog.


	22. Interlude 1: Of Memory Management (Divine) and A Case in Elis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Consulting God investigates the concept of Better Living Through Chemistry, sorts through some files, and comes to a conclusion. 
> 
> _Warnings for nonlinear recollection, horizontal pursuits, tagging, experimental grammar, the creation of monsters, relative innocence, and popping a/the question._

The God stirred, yawned, and slowly opened his eyes to the shadow and starlight that were always present in his chamber. This very early morning, however, there was something else inside it with him; something far better than just the tattering remnants of some mostly-fled dream lingering about his couch. Instead, his arm was asleep, and asleep on top of it was a mortal.

His mouth was just a little open, and he was snoring softly. His gilt-and-silver hair was going in a number of directions it didn’t normally go when he was awake and about. His face sagged a bit against the pillow, and marks of some of the pillow’s wrinkles were pressed into his cheek. One of his arms was trapped underneath the God, just under his shoulder. The other was folded up between them, hand pressed warm over the God’s heart.

To look down at that hand, to look across at the sleeping face so near his own, made the God suddenly and irrationally feel as if the hand was the only thing holding a crowd of feelings in place inside him, ready to spill out should Iaon move the hand or open those sea-blue eyes. And at that feeling he found himself slowly smiling, even though there would have been a time when any such idea would have filled him with alarm. For so very long, before this man came, the God—operating from within a worldview in which feelings and the Work were inimical to one another—would have adjudged such a state of affairs to be abnormal, indeed dangerous.

But now everything was up for re-evaluation. It wasn’t that he’d been _wrong_ , of course: nothing of the kind. It was simply that the parameters of the scenario had significantly changed, and therefore everything had to be rethought, restructured. It would of course be something of a juggling act for the God to manage all this while the Work was ongoing. But what choice did he have? The Work, after all, would hardly stop just because… because…

 _Because Its chief devotee has fallen in love,_ the God thought. His breath caught, and then slowly let go again as he felt the joy come welling back up inside him. Admittedly the basic idea was so new that he was still a little shy of even thinking the words. But the sheer terror and angry loathing that such a concept would once have induced in the God were suddenly and miraculously missing, just as Alone had absented itself from his secret place without a whisper of notice.

Love…

 _Such a vicious motivator,_ had been his scornful evaluation of the emotion as recently as the resolution of the case in Tiryns. But the God had been willfully turning a blind eye to its other effects. _And there’s_ _At_ _ê_ _the Blinder at work again,_ he thought, rueful. _How long this seemed to me like a pathology, a psychopathy. Or else I mocked it as something ‘normal.’_ When in actual experience it showed itself so exalted above all kinds of normalcy he’d ever dreamed of that it almost made the usually-hateful word acceptable by mere contagion.

The God sighed, forced to admit to himself that his data had been incompletely sourced and inadequately evaluated. It had taken another point of view, and the presence of that unique unseen light of which the Prince was the most perfect conductor, to clarify the single vital variable that the God had omitted from his calculations.

“Iaon,” the God whispered, breath-soft, half afraid to wake him. But his Prince didn’t move. He went on sleeping deep, though the snoring had for the moment stopped, and his mouth had closed, and there was just the slightest curve of smile showing on the side away from the pillow. The God reached out to brush Iaon’s cheek ever so softly with one knuckle, tracing down the pronounced smile-line that ran between nose and mouth. Not even slumber’s relaxation or the starlight’s cool faintness had power to do away with lines so deep. But many lesser signs of the Prince’s age and cares were smoothed away, and an unwonted peace and ease rested on his face. He looked not only younger and more serene, but also somehow _wiser_.

It was a strange effect, one that made the God pause to consider it more closely. After all, the Prince’s wisdom wasn’t something he ever forcibly brought to one’s attention. It either wrapped itself in dry self-deprecating wit the way Iaon wrapped himself in those workaday linen-canvas tunics, or else—when not being purposely concealed—slipped out so quietly, so diffidently, that it could be missed entirely if too much else was going on. Yet on seeing this face at rest, unguarded, one instantly understood that the Prince _knew_ things: things both grave and glad, some forged in pain and some burnished by laughter and some sharpened by years to a fine keen edge, and one could see how they all lay quiet at the core of him, guiding how he spoke and what he did. In the rush and madness of one of their average days, this truth, so obvious under these circumstances, might pass completely unseen. _Yet here it is, my Prince. One more time, all over again, there you are…_

Iaon sighed in his sleep, cuddled down a little harder into the pillow: the half-smile deepened. _And how many other expressions does he reveal while he’s asleep that I’ve never seen before?_ the God thought. _How much could I have learned about him, known about him, that I completely missed for weeks and months, simply because I never paid attention when he slept, because it was ‘boring’? Even when he sat out there in his chair and did it right in front of me. So much data I let slip by, so much wasted time…_

 _But I didn’t have the right to do_ this _before. I do now. And I will never waste a moment of so precious a right again._

“Iaon,” the God murmured again, very low, and reached out to stroke that beautiful face once more. But then he stopped himself, not willing to run the risk of waking his Prince. Iaon had had a longish day, and the God knew from many another day of the kind how badly the Prince needed his sleep even when all they’d been doing was chasing evildoers from dusk to dawn. His companion’s dogged determination to keep up with the God kept making him forget that Iaon still had only had a mortal’s stamina to bear him up through life with an immortal.

For the time being he slipped his free arm around his Prince again and watched Iaon’s eyes begin to tremble a little under his eyelids as some passing dream brushed its wings across his sleeping mind. Briefly the God considered slowing time down inside the Chamber to better examine this phenomenon… but then it occurred to him that Iaon’s dream or his perception of it might be disturbed by the alteration, and that was wholly unacceptable. Finally he sighed and lay back against his own pillow, suffering time to continue moving at its ordinary pace while he watched and felt the soft rise and fall of the Prince’s chest… that breath that had so nearly gone out of Iaon on that bad night more than a month ago, and not come back in again. _Yet see what can come of even such evil,_ the God thought. _The impossible, the wonderful._ This _night, this miraculous night…_

Closing his eyes, the God let his head fall forward again to rest against Iaon’s shoulder, briefly overwhelmed by the sensations still echoing in his body. He hadn’t been surprised that after their first lovemaking he’d needed to sleep. What _did_ surprise the God was that for the first time he could remember, sleep hadn’t presented itself to him as the ruthless enemy intent on shutting down deduction and sucking rationality away into some inescapable maelstrom of inchoate imagery. Instead it had arrived as something to be met in company, with his Prince beside him; something to share, something to embrace together as they embraced one another. And when he woke, it wasn’t to an overwhelming desire to escape from the couch and start frantically doing things.

The God pulled back and opened his eyes to look again into the face of the mortal sleeping a few inches away. _Well, there_ are _some matters to take care of… but the context has changed._ …And then he smiled, because now there were a thousand new things to discover, and nothing could be better than that. When the world around him had changed so radically, only the most slipshod scientist would let the change go unexamined… and the God was never slipshod. _I’ve got to understand it all, or at least prepare to. All the things that happen now must be saved, catalogued, analyzed. Even the things that now seem unimportant. After all, how long did I look at_ him _and not see what the things I was seeing_ meant? _And now I begin to know. Things that make no sense to me today may do so later if I preserve them._

_…Time to start preserving, then._

He was of course still somewhat stuck underneath Iaon, and even as the God worked out how best to undo that sweet state he felt a little pang at the thought of letting go of this warmth, the closeness, even for just a few minutes. _But it’s not as if you can’t have this again, whenever you want,_ he thought. _Because he said as much, clearly._ And the God wanted to laugh, now, at the frightened uncertainties that had crawled all over him like ants last night in the kitchen: they were gone. _This is no accident,_ _no misunderstanding or whim. My Prince is too deliberate, too considerate, too… too_ Iaon… _to ever say such things to anyone without being absolutely sure of what he meant._ It was as much a pleasure to tell himself that as it was a reassurance. _And there’s more data to work with than just words. His eyes…_

The God swallowed hard against the tightness in his throat, thinking of all the ways Iaon’s gaze had rested in his over the hours just past. Whether the mood of the moment had been hungry or lazy or fierce or tender, he had never felt so _known_ in all his life: or so accepted, so loved. At the mere memory the joy rose up in the God again, and once again he had to get past the old reflex that insisted he should mistrust and fear so powerful a feeling. For all the old arid places in his depths were now knee-deep in that joy, overflowing with it; the waters were inexorably rising, that warm blue sea flooding him… _And I want it. I_ want _it._

Finally the God sighed and stroked the couch with his free hand, silently telling it to let him out. Like nearly all the other furnishings in the chamber it was a construct of shadow, malleable to his will. Without affecting the Prince in the slightest, the couch let the God press his trapped arm down through it, so that he could then draw it up to him again, out of Iaon’s way. Quietly and carefully he stroked the shadow-covers away from him, tucking them in around the Prince. Then slowly the God sat up, put his legs down through the couch and stood, wading away through the couch as if through warm thick water. It solidified in his wake as he waved open the access to the en-suite bath next door, softly going in to take care of certain bodily necessities to which even Gods were liable.

He was away only a few minutes, but even so it surprised the God how all that time his arms were complaining to him that they were empty, and his whole body was urging him to hurry back lest Iaon awaken and find him gone. When the God slipped back into the chamber again, he paused and simply stood there at the side of the couch for some moments in silence, looking down at the mortal. He remembered how it had been on some recent mornings—when Iaon had all unknowingly been keeping him company in his dreams—to wake and find his Prince nowhere near. Now it could be like that for his love, and it wasn’t acceptable that even for a second Iaon should possibly be subjected to that loneliness, that sorrow.

 _From now on when we sleep here,_ the God said silently to the Chamber and the shadows in it, and through them to all the shadows in the House, _the moment his resting state begins to shift,_ _inform me instantly. …Or no: don’t bother informing me, just fetch me back here, wherever I am. Once he starts to wake, I must be here with him before he draws even one breath more._

The walls of the Chamber, such as they were, trembled around him a little at the command.

The God rolled his eyes. _Oh, all right,_ not _if I’m on the toilet_ , he said. _Use some sense._

The walls calmed down.

The God chuckled very softly at this, and then caught himself at it, and smiled. Would he have found this at all funny even as recently as yesterday? All kinds of unexpected things were going on inside him. Normally such interior changes without a concrete reason for them would have terrified him. But here and now—and his eyes rested longingly on the shape lying pale against the couch’s darkness and the shadows that covered him—here and now, the fears were banished.

He spent another few seconds simply enjoying the view, and then reached down two-handed into the shadow that lay roiling gently all about. The God tugged up the shadow up against him, draping and wrapping it about himself like a wide dark sheet, finally flipping a long trailing end over one shoulder and patting it into place.

Then the God made his way over to the far side of the chamber, where the walls looked less definite than they did anywhere else. At his approach, the barrier between the chamber and the entrance to the foyer of his Palace of Thought went thin and darkly transparent, then shimmered away entirely as the God passed through it and into the ground-floor entry to his structured memory storage.

On the other side of the barrier, the light shone more sharply, bright moonlight as well as starlight filling the space. Silver light rested on stairways and ramps that arced up and around from the ground-floor level, making their spiral way around what seemed the circular bottom level of a great roofless hollow tower. Up above him into endless dimness the tower reared, the white moon shining down through the center of it, the stairs and ramps spiraling up and up and out of sight. Endless doorways opened off them, night-black patches against the pale-lit, polished black stone of the tower’s interior.

In here sound and light and all other physical matters were under the God’s absolute control: Iaon would not see or be disturbed by anything that happened on this side of the barrier. The God stood there silent for a moment, looking up into the darkness, and then raised his arms and called the memories to him.

From every direction they came swirling, and for a wild moment or two the God was hidden at the heart of the swarm of them, the single still figure at the heart of a cyclone-whirl of light of imagery and concretely expressed sensoria; taste and scent and touch presenting themselves for convenience’s sake in synaesthetic format, aroma and flavour and the stroking of fingers over flesh painting themselves on the air in color and shape. He let the memories stretch their wings for a little, expending some energy that would otherwise have resisted him when it came time to sort them into their proper categories, and stood there just briefly with his head thrown back as it had been when Iaon’s mouth first touched him just at that spot where throat met chest, and then gently bit. – _No, best keep that memory at arm’s length just now,_ the God thought, as all around him the memories fluttered and shivered, stirred second-hand by the memory of his reaction.

At this he started to wonder if some of the less tightly-regulated parts of his mind were attempting to take advantage of recent events, with an eye to getting a little fractious. Allowing them to get out of hand wouldn’t be a good precedent to set. _All right, settle down now!_ the God ordered.

The little storm of memories swiftly fell to the shining floor around him like leaves out of a wind that had ceased, carpeting the monochrome space all around in bright smears and shavings of color and image. But he couldn’t quite get rid of the thought that there was some surreptitiously amused rustling and shuffling going on down there amid the memories waiting to be sorted.

The God rolled his eyes and glanced around him, considering where to start putting things. For some weeks now he’d found himself having to do periodic reassessments and restructurings of the memories associated with Iaon, as his understanding of the man grew more complex and nuanced and the new material to be archived for later analysis and perusal started piling up. And then there’d been the upheaval the other day when he’d been trying to get to grips with the changes wrought in his interior world by Iaon’s increasing closeness. _I suppose it’s best to keep everything close to the ingress for the moment_ , he thought. _For if the last day or two are anything to go by, for a while the changes will doubtless come thick and fast._

Then he grinned a little at what Iaon would have said about such a thought if he’d heard it: doubtless something about that not being the only thing that came thick and fast in this neighborhood.The God shook his head. _My Prince,_ the God thought, gesturing over at the curve of the near wall, _what_ are _you doing to me?_

Obedient to his will, a round space in the curve went darker, thinning away to a circular night-black portal—the gateway to a new memory storage. The God closed his eyes for a moment, delving into that darkness in mind and structuring it into smaller interim storages, an assortment of large and small cubbyholes with outlines traced against the darkness in light. Some would have a keyword attached as they were filled, some a key image or sensorial tag, a scent, a particular sort of touch. Those minor cataloguing and tabulation issues he would manage on the fly.

The God turned back to the bright scatter of memories lying on the floor and gestured at the nearest of them; it leapt into the air for examination. An image of hands moving, the low soft sound of Iaon’s laughter. _Expand,_ the God said silently, and the memory stretched itself out living across the air and through his mind—

> —the two of them lying almost nose to nose, the God’s eyes half-closed with pleasure. “Yet at the same time another of your mothers is the Queen of not just love in the abstract, but physical love too,” said the Prince softly, stroking down the God’s chest, pausing as his fingers slid over one nipple. “And come to think of it, that makes Eros your cousin, doesn’t it?... I’m betting there’s something in that strand of your heredity that might surface if you let it.” He smiled as his first and second fingers moved to either side of that nipple, scissored softly closed; the God gasped almost inaudibly, a sigh running backwards, as the fingers moved gently together and the nipple tightened. “All of Greyeyes’ intelligence and at least four Muses’ worth of science have a part in you. Not to mention the music and all the rest of it. Why not this too, Aphroditëidês?”
> 
> He had to chuckle at the Prince’s invented matronymic form, unorthodox though it might be. “I don’t know if my Mummy would appreciate you stuffing her into a kilt.”
> 
> “On the contrary,” said the Prince, running a soft fingertip around that nipple, then just skimming over the bud of it to watch it tighten harder, provoking another gasp. “She’s the Queen of all loves, after all. Bet if you put her in a kilt she’d work it for all she was worth, and there wouldn’t be a man or woman in range who could say no to her. Anyway, she’s worn male semblances often enough while doing her rounds, if the poets are to be believed. She’d have worn a kilt at some point or another.” He chuckled. “Wouldn’t be much worn _under_ that kilt, either, I’d guess.”
> 
> The hand spread, opened, ran flat down from the God’s chest, stroking gently along the belly. And then the Prince chuckled under his breath at what he found under his fingers. “Look at this. Considering how you turned up, how do you even have a navel?”
> 
> “Aesthetics perhaps,” the God muttered.
> 
> “I think it might possibly have additional uses,” the Prince murmured. “Shall I perform an experiment?” And he slid downward to test the theory.
> 
> _“We,_ if you please,” the God said rather huskily as he rolled over onto his back. “I shouldn’t like to be left out of the data compilation—” He gasped again as the Prince breathed into the spot he was investigating; a long, warm, soft breath that made all the hairs on the God’s belly stand up, and other things as well—
> 
> “Oh indeed,” the Prince said, his voice full of his smile, turning his head for a moment, so that his breath brushed briefly over the God’s manhood and the wet patch underneath its head. “You’ll get your turn, my lad,” he said to it. _“Patience....”_ The single word, breathed closer still, made every single hair on the God stand up as his erection bounced, made him writhe gently against the couch and moan.
> 
> “Additional uses,” the Prince said softly. “Yes, I’d say this’d be one. When you’re loving the body, there are things that feel like each other… stand in for each other. This…” and he paused, then slipped his tongue so gently downward, “it’s rather like something one might do elsewhere. One circles around… then dips in…”
> 
> The God writhed, but not too hard; not so hard as to disturb what that sweet tongue was up to. “ _Meliglossos…_ ” he breathed.
> 
> The Prince merely smiled, went on with what he was doing. “Did you pick that up before your promise?” he said, lifting his head a little to thoughtfully regard the God’s omphalos with the air of a craftsman evaluating a work in progress.
> 
> “Pick, ohh, _what_ up?” the God more or less said, his words getting caught midway on another moan as the Prince resumed his artistic efforts.
> 
> “The epithet.”
> 
> “My very dear Iaon… are you suggesting I’m repeating someone’s second-hand words? I’ve _tasted_ your tongue… _ohhhhhhh!”_
> 
> Iaon’s eyebrows went up. “Mmm, no question,” the Prince said, “sensitive there. That bodes well for other matters. Experiment’s a success, I’d say.” He grinned against the God’s belly. “Definitely adds something beyond mere aesthetics. Wouldn’t you agree?” And he slid his tongue into the God’s navel again, more deeply this time.
> 
> _“Nggghhhh…!!”_
> 
> Thereupon the Prince set about proving himself a most thorough researcher as he began embarking upon a string of further experiments. In the dimness, compact hands—strong yet so delicate, callused here and there from work and the sword but soft in all the ways that mattered—and a mouth most perceptive and sensitive to detail now began moving gently over him; spread fingers began stroking, fingertips or lips brushing, tongue tasting and probing, all of them intent on collecting all sorts of pertinent data: every inch of the God being slowly and leisurely learned, becoming known. There were no words for how strange it was to have someone else doing this to _him_. It was _his_ job to catalogue, to classify, to map and learn… But it seemed as if there was some transfer of roles going on, an exchange of far more than just DNA.
> 
> A soft chuckle as the side of the Prince’s face was bumped by something that twitched at his touch, soft but yearning to probe. “Now, now, what’s all _this_ , then?”
> 
> The very Yard-ish catchphrase made the God smile even as he tilted his head back and caught his lower lip with his upper teeth at the sensation. “You’ve been spending _way_ too much time with the Investigator, my Prince…”
> 
> A chuckle in one direction. “Hush now.” And in the other: “Yes, I did promise to get back to you, didn’t I. It was just important for no one else to feel left out. Considering that it seems likely I’ll be spending…” A deeper chuckle at the possible pun. “A considerable amount of time…” Warm breath, the God shivering all over. “Right _here…”_
> 
> Silence. And then the gasp, the moan. Repeated. Repeated. Repeated again…

—The God steadied his breath down, smiled, tagged the whole long sweet memory with the glowing air-scribbled word _meliglossos,_ and waved it through into the storage. The memory promptly collapsed itself down to the feeling-of-tongue-teasing-navel and winged off into the darkness.

The God gestured at the floor again, sweeping the next memory into the air with both hands. It rose, unfurled itself—

> “Say it again.”
> 
> “What? You know how I hate repeating myself. Why say it again?”
> 
> “So I can say ‘yes’ again.” The brush of lips, the smile pressed against his skin. “Because I will never get tired of saying ‘yes’ to you.”
> 
> —and the feeling of his chest going warm again, going full, simply so full, at the touch of the Prince’s lips and the sense of being so seamlessly enfolded in perfect comfort and consent. _No matter what the anatomical realities may be,_ the God thought, _no wonder the matters of the heart locate themselves in the chest. This feeling,_ oh…

— _Chest/heart,_ the God tagged it as he folded the memory down to compact size again and waved it into the darkness. He waved another one up from the floor, flicked it open—

> “You’re a physician…”
> 
> “A _warrior_ -physician, or so I’m told.”
> 
> “Yes, quite, thank you for the clarification. This bit right here. This little ridgy bit. Does this even have a name?”
> 
> A drawn-out groan as a soft warm breath washes over the location in question. “Why yes, as a matter of fact, it does! It’s called ‘the bit I would really love you to kiss _right now.’”_
> 
> “Ever obedient to my Prince’s command…”
> 
> “Oh, sure, you say that _now_ , but just let me mention the word ‘Tesko’ and _ohhhhhhh….”_
> 
> And another chuckle. “Now, now, let’s not start discussing milk, my Prince. _Cream,_ however...”
> 
> A moan. Another one.
> 
> Then a dark chuckle. And more noises, some without names…

_—Intimate anatomy, taxonomy, Tesko,_ the God thought, and grinned in amusement as he waved the tagged memory through into the storage. He turned and beckoned another memory up into the silver-lit air, this one tasting of indignation and laughter and feeling like the Prince’s chest hair against the God’s cheek.

> “Well, I wouldn’t be so sure. For example… Well, take Archyngeïs and Andreidês now—”
> 
> A shocked intake of breath. _“Iaon!_ How dare you even _mention_ those names in here!”
> 
> “What? Because we were talking about affection and love in the abstract, and—”
> 
> “Those two shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same sentence with such concepts, my Prince! Don’t talk nonsense.”
> 
> “I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you. You’re always saying that even Gods can suffer from your cousin’s arrowshot. Even in their sordid little way… they’ve got what we’ve got.”
> 
> “Nothing like! Oh, don’t even try to make me _think_ what they’re like together when they’re encouched...”
> 
> “Too late. You’re thinking of it already.”
> 
> “And you’re sleeping on the sofa tonight, Iaon. I mean it!”
> 
> A giggle. “Let’s see just how long that lasts. Or how long I’m alone.”
> 
> “Don’t tempt your local divinity, Prince…”
> 
> “Why not? When you can _ohhhhh yes pleeease…”_
> 
> “You know, you’re right, that really _is_ very effective. Must make sure to use that one on you often.”
> 
> “I’ve created a monster!”
> 
> “Oh, don’t try to take credit, now! Remember what the text said. Truth in advertising, my Iaon…”

_Monsters, creation of,_ the God thought, attaching the tag. _And…_ _I will_ not _have their names in here, I_ won’t, _I went further than usual even letting the Tesko in…_ Then he grinned a small grim half-grin reminiscent of one of Iaon’s. _Eros, multiple indiscretions of. Yard issues, miscellaneous, supernumerary personnel. No, make that ‘superfluous’._ He waved the memory away into the dark before he had to look at it any longer or even think of _their_ names again.

It went on that way for a good while as the God called the memories up one by one and sorted them. He was surprised by the sheer volume of archive-worthy material generated by even so short a time under the covers with Iaon. _But this is a first time,_ he thought, smiling gently. _The first of many. It wouldn’t do to be too conservative about what’s kept. After all, it’s not like I’m short of space in here…_

The floor was mostly cleaned up and the God was turning back to the bright scraps of memory one more time when suddenly there was a crowd of little uprearing darknesses around his knees, waving themselves and patting at him and timidly trying to get the God’s attention, while the sheet of shadows draped about the God started to shiver against him. _He begins to wake…_

Immediately the God turned, his shadow whirling around him, and swept out through the barrier and back into the Chamber again. Softly he went to the side of the couch, looking down just as the Prince, curled over on one side, took a long long breath, let it out, and opened his eyes. They went right to the God, almost as if even in his sleep Iaon had felt him standing there and knew where he’d be.

The Prince smiled at him sleepily. “Hello…” he said, and slid a hand along the couch toward where the God stood.

The God’s chest went warm inside again at the look. He sat down on the couch and took the hand the Prince reached to him, kissing it and then pressing it against his chest. “Iaon.”

“You were watching me.”

“The House may guard your dreams,” said the God, “but as for your sleep, that’s something I now claim the right to guard.” He reached down to slide a hand through the Prince’s hair. “After all, you guard me in your waking hours. Perhaps I’ve never been clear how carefully.” He paused. “I never did thank you properly for saving me from the amphisboena.”

The Prince shrugged. “That doesn’t matter.”

“But it does, my Iaon, very much. That whole situation could have gone quite badly.”

The Prince stretched, leaned up on one elbow. “Well, you _are_ immortal. It couldn’t have killed you.”

“But it could have damaged me quite badly… and with the venom in the bite of a beast like that, there’s the question of whether the wounds would ever have healed. Or whether I’d ever again have been free of the pain.” But then the God smiled wryly. “Also, in archetype, such scenarios usually mean that the immortal gets to lie around crippled and oozing on a couch for years and years until some clueless innocent of a hero with healing hands turns up to put him right.” The God cocked a thoughtful eye at Iaon. “Magic spears are often involved. Your spear’s not magic, by any chance?”

The Prince laughed wickedly. “Well, I’m reliably informed…”

The God rolled his eyes, amused. “Your _real_ spear, Prince.”

“Oh, well. Not that I’ve noticed. So I suppose things turned out better this way. Saved ourselves a few steps…” And he gave the God a look of good-natured irony. “Who’re you calling clueless?”

“Not you, my Prince. Never you.” The God bent down to him, and lips met lips, softly and long. “Besides, archetype also usually calls for an innocent in that role.” His voice went dark and wicked. “And after the last few hours…”

Iaon smiled up into the God’s eyes. “Or for all I know, days. What time _is_ it, anyway?”

“In here? Whatever time I tell it to be.”

“No, seriously.”

“Half past forever… or a quarter to now. Which do you prefer? Command me, my Prince, and it’s done.” Another of those kisses, deep; a promise, or the fulfillment of one, so that while time didn’t exactly stop, at least it slowed down to a stroll and checked to see if there’d been any texts. “Anyway, where you’re concerned, plainly ‘innocent’…” The God chuckled again, affectionate and wicked. “…would seem to be misplaced as a descriptor.”

The Prince laughed just as softly. “Now, now. I save my purity of heart for when I go into the houses of the sick, my God. And in _this_ house, no one’s sick at all.”

“Oh, on the contrary, my Prince. I’m quite sick… with desire for you.”

“So dramatic,” Iaon said. “For me, or a certain part of me?”

“Well, it’s all part of a single holistic offering, I’m told. I hesitate to use the word ‘package.’”

“You really don’t,” the Prince said, and chuckled: perhaps not as deeply as the God could, but what he lacked in baritone range he more than made up for in wickedness. “Well, whole or part, we can’t put up with any sickness around here, now can we.” And smiling gently, Iaon reached up to the God, drew him down. “Obviously you need a doctor. Or medical care of _some_ kind.” Warm arms slid around the God, folded him close. “So come here,” said the Prince, soft-breathed, in his ear, “and once I’ve worked out just where your problem is… you can let me kiss it better.”

The God shivered all over, deliciously, and was on the point of telling the sheet of shadow enwrapping him to go take a coffee break, when behind him a soft chime sounded. He groaned, then looked over his shoulder. A line of letters was spelling itself out in white light across the air; as the God watched that line finish, another started.

“Oh no,” he muttered, and buried his face in the Prince’s chest. There went the whole line of inquiry he’d just started examining in his mind: the question of what the Prince was most likely about to teach him next, the newest in a series of what were surely going to be truly glorious experiments— And then the God thought uneasily, _What’s the matter with me? Am I broken? It’s a_ case. _The Work is calling! How is it that I’m not happy that there’s a case?_

The Prince stopped what he was doing, ran a hand through the God’s hair and looked at him with concern. “What? What’s the matter?”

“Case, Iaon.” He nodded back at the text that had finished itself and was hanging there glowing.

“Well, yes, so I gathered, but— Are you not feeling all right?” And his Prince’s hands were suddenly moving all over him, not in the couch mode either, but feeling his pulse and pulling one of his eyelids down to peer curiously into his eye. “You sound glum all of a sudden.”

“No, it’s just that—”

“You’re not hung over, are you? Can’t be. You didn’t have anything like that much to drink last night...”

“No,” the God said. “It’s not that. But, you know—it’s that we’re, well—” He didn’t really know how to articulate what he was thinking, which by itself was most bizarre. Or rather he could think of about twenty different ways, each of which seemed entirely too likely to come out wrong. “I’d thought that—perhaps you wouldn’t want to, I mean—“

The Prince looked at him as if he’d taken leave of his Godly senses. “Wait, what? Because we’re—”

Iaon broke off; then pushed the God up by the shoulders a little. He sat himself up against the slope of the couch and pulled the God back to him, so that he leaned against Iaon’s chest while the Prince, with his arms wrapped around the God, looked over the text hanging there in the air. _“Holy Zeus,”_ he said under his breath.

“Yes,” the God said. “My thought exactly.”

And then, to the God’s astonishment, as the Prince kept reading, he started chuckling. “But as for what you were thinking about,” he said, his tone a little abstracted as he read, “come on, now. You’re the Consulting God, and I’m your warrior-Doctor, your blogger, all the rest of it… and we’re needed! Becoming that is what brought us to this point, brought us together this way. It’s what we _are._ Why would I want to stop?”

The God looked at him in quiet astonishment while Iaon finished reading. “Anyway, not much point in staying under the covers when something like _this_ comes up,” the Prince said finally; and he turned a wry look on the God. “Right out of the gate I thought you’d alienated half the Gods in Olympus, and it actually turns out to be more like all of them. But now here’s the _most_ important one you got on the wrong side of, suddenly needing your help for one of his own naughty kids. Leaves you with a chance to weigh down the scales a little on the other side.”

“That had occurred to me,” the God said under his breath. “In a general sense.”

“And anyway…” Iaon looked annoyed. “Here’s bloody Elis back to haunt us again. King Aithlios _himself_ this time, that complete arse. And after the last time—don’t know about you, but _I_ wouldn’t mind saving his sorry butt and leaving him seriously in our debt after everything he put us through before! Not to mention giving the King of Gods and Men reason to wish he’d paid attention to us a whole lot sooner, and making Argeiphontês look good into the bargain. How can we refuse?”

The God looked at Iaon in delight, and very slowly smiled. “My Prince,” he said, “I can’t think when I last heard you say so much about a case before we actually started work. I’d almost get the idea you’re in favor of this enterprise.”

The Prince took the God under the jaw, pulled his face over, and kissed him with slow fierce intent. Then he let him go and slid off the couch, making for the bathroom. “Best go put some clothes on, my God. If we turn up like this at the Yard, deities will talk.”

“They do little else,” said the God, and turned away. There was little use in it, though, for there was nowhere for him to hide that smile. His last concern about the changes in his world had just dissolved, like so much else, in the blue of Iaon’s eyes.

***

The God had little leisure to return to the business of memory management for some days, as the case that Argeiphontes dumped onto their doorstep swiftly turned into an incredible tangle of mixed motivations, diplomatic incidents _in_ _potentia_ , and general annoyance at the profound stupidity of almost all mortals who were not Iaon. Between endless mad dashes back and forth between Elis (to evaluate what seemed like a never-ending stream of conflicting data) and the House (to try to do some decent analysis on it instead of the slipshod junk that was coming out of the Yard), the God hardly saw the inside of the Chamber for the guts of a tenday except to slip silently in at odd hours to snatch a brief sweet glimpse of the Prince grabbing what little “sack time” (as he called it) the Work allowed him. And it did delight the God that Iaon now showed no sign whatever of wanting to sleep anywhere else in the House—the exception being the sitting-room sofa, and only then either because the God was esconced in his chair by the fire, thinking hard, or lying on the sofa as well with his head in his Prince’s lap, thinking hard there too.

But finally it was over—the whole tangled business which the Prince later described publicly in his blog as “The Adventure of the Royal Bachelor”, and which he repeatedly referred to within the protecting walls of the House as “The Adventure of the Royal Bloody Fucking Asshat”. Then came a joint twenty-four hour collapse, for the final three-day island-hopping chase had driven both the God and his blogger to the brink of physical exhaustion—the King’s fiancee’s kidnapper having stolen Athena’s wet-and-dry sandals, which had been out on exhibition at the Goddess’s great temple in Athens, and which were almost as high-velocity as Hermes when they got going. And after their sleep, when the Prince and the God had both spent some hours lolling in their chairs by the fire and eating a great deal of the choice viands of Ch’in, and after they’d killed most of the amphora of nonresinated designer plonk that King Aithlios, the prat, had sent them… _then_ , finally, when the sheer exhaustion had worn off, the two of them had time for other business in the Chamber. And the next day, or it might have been the day after that—who could be sure?—the God had once more slipped off the couch and through the barrier between the sleeping space and the foyer of his Palace of Thought, with more memories to catalogue.

—The God sighed, standing there in the silence with the moon shining down and everything brushed silvery all about him: everything except for the color-splashed veils and banners of memory lying along the dark-polished floor, waiting to be sorted. He gestured the nearest of them up into the air—

> “You cannot _possibly_ be ready again.”
> 
> “Iaon. The evidence suggests otherwise.”
> 
> A soft groan. “Oh, my God. _Mercy!_ Just ten minutes more.”
> 
> “And when one eliminates the impossible…”
> 
> The sound of one eye opening. “What’s plainly impossible is me copping even five minutes more kip.”
> 
> “I was thinking about that last suggestion you made…”
> 
> Hopeless soft laughter. “Of course you were.”
> 
> “Even if _you_ don’t feel up to anything right this minute…”
> 
> “You’re mocking me now.”
> 
> “Iaon! I would never. Look, I had the room fetch our wine in. Here, have yours, it’s very strengthening.”
> 
> The rustle of an intrigued mortal pushing himself up, really only a little reluctantly, among the pillows. “You had the _room_ fetch the wine in?... Thank you.”
> 
> “It’s a very clever room. Or actually, the shadows are. But then they’re _my_ shadows…”
> 
> “And so, of course, quite clever.” A brief silence, with the faintest sound as of someone drinking. “Mmm. Thanks.”
> 
> “Think nothing of it. Well, anyway, I could do that, I think. The thing we were discussing.”
> 
> “You think?”
> 
> “Yes.” A thoughtful pause. “But something else first.”
> 
> A smile, a look across the wineglass from under those quizzical eyebrows. “I’m almost afraid to ask.”
> 
> “Did you know that you have dimples above your arse? Quite deep ones.”
> 
> Another pause, this one also thoughtful, though for different reasons. “You’re going to explain to me now how this involves one of us sucking the other’s—”
> 
> “Not sucking, for this one. Drinking rather. There are sex acts, aren't there, that involve people eating or drinking off one another?”
> 
> A chuckle. “Well, it’s not like there’s a unified reference on the subject, my God. Mostly people improvise. But yes, some people do enjoy eating and drinking off each other. Of course it can get a bit messy…”
> 
> “Not here.”
> 
> Another silence consonant with finishing the wine remaining in a wineglass. “Hmm, yes, the Mystery of the Missing Wet Spot. I take your point.”
> 
> “So. It would be interesting to determine how much wine would fit into each dimple…”
> 
> “I _knew_ it. Not encouched with you even a fortnight and already I’m a bloody experiment.” And then the sound of helpless laughter. “And now you’re going to tell me it’s for Science.”
> 
> “Well, it _might_ have been.”
> 
> Another chuckle, softer. “Tell you what, my God. I’m going to drink this wine, which is, as you point out, quite strengthening. And if you don’t hurry up, I’m going to drink yours too, and not leave you any to pour into any dimples whatsoever.” A rustling of covers and pillows. “And then…”
> 
> A pause. “Then?”
> 
> A longer silence, again thoughtful. “Then I think I may lie down on the bloody dimples, pull you on top of me, and snog you quite hard to see where that leads us. Because I seem to be… _recovering_ unusually quickly… and I can’t help but suspect it’s because you’ve put something experimental in the wine.”
> 
> So very innocent a silence from the other side of the discussion: but if silence can smile, this one does. Chemistry is, after all, such a wonderful thing. Even getting it wrong can sometimes be fun…
> 
> A sigh. “Oh, all right, then. For bloody Science.” And a smile in this ensuing silence, too, as one lover rolls over in the hazy starlight and pulls the other one close.
> 
> And then that strange and wonderful sense of rightness settles in again as mortal flesh-and-blood wraps itself around immortal flesh-and-ichor: the feeling that something has either become perfect, or is on its way to becoming so—

…and suddenly, as the God stood there watching matters unfold, he understood why (an age or so ago, it seemed) he’d started having trouble getting out of his semblances, the more often he wore them. _A symptom of something deeper,_ he thought: for the semblances were after all wrought of merely mortal matter fashioned into the likeness of breath and life. _Mortality_ longs _to enclose immortality. It loves having it inside it, the more they’re together. Mortality hates letting the Immortal go. It’s a_ thing—

“Couldn’t sleep?” said the quiet voice from behind him.

“What? Oh. No, I just woke up. Thought of something.”

“What of?” Arms slipped under his and wrapped around his waist from behind: the side of the Prince’s face, a little stubbly, pressed against the God’s back as Iaon peered around his arm.

“This—”

The God spread his arms wide again, giving the memory leave to replay itself. Iaon watched, the God feeling his head tilt a little to one side in that typical mannerism of interest.

“Mmm,” the Prince said. “Yes, that was a memorable afternoon, wasn’t it.” And he stepped around beside the God, one arm still around his waist, and looked up at the memory as it continued to play itself out. “Thanks for reminding me. Because I did mean to ask: what _was_ that you put in the wine?”

The God did his best to look faintly scandalised. “Prince. When have you ever known _me_ to adulterate wine?”

“The stuff that we get straight from Dionysus himself, his very best? Never. And quite right too, because figuratively _and_ literally, it’d be sacrilege. But way more ordinary plonk that a cheapskate King gave us, that wasn’t worth anything better than being turned into piss in the first place no matter how many fancy varietal names his supplier stuck on it? _That_ you’d adulterate in a heartbeat if you found something interesting to put in it.”

“I, ah—” The God squirmed a little.

“Now don’t even _try_ , you.” And the body standing beside him, holding him happily prisoner with just one strong arm, was shaking with laughter. “You can lie your loinwrap off with everybody else, but _me_ , I know you for real.”

“My Iaon,” the God murmured, flicking a hand at the hanging memory so that it folded itself up and fled through the dark portal into storage, “you hide your status as a wine connoisseur very cleverly under those farmhand tunics of yours.”

“Who should know wine better than the people who grow it to drink themselves?” Iaon said. “No middlemen to blame a bad vintaging on. You learn by doing, believe me.” He moved around in front of the God and slipped his other arm around him again, looking up into his face. “And I haven’t stopped, either, so now you can please answer the question I asked you. Which I can tell perfectly well that you’re trying to distract me from with your only-slightly-backhanded compliments. _About that wine…”_

The tone was teasing, but the God could just see a hint of the Prince’s steel coming into the blue of those eyes, which somehow still managed to hold most of their color even in this monochrome environment. _How does he do that?_ the God thought. Yet the idea had occurred to him once or twice before that prolonged residence on Olympus, or in the near vicinity of a God, or both, might possibly have some effect on a mortal’s innate qualities and abilities. And the Prince was in any case extraordinary, and extraordinary beings had a tendency to become more so over time. Another area ripe for experiment, though quantifying exactly _what_ changes one was testing for would be—

The God blinked as the Prince shook him gently. “Wake up now,” Iaon said. “No going away when I’m talking to you.”

“That would be the last thing I desired,” the God said, tilting his head down to Iaon’s, his own smile curving up to match the other’s.

“Then let’s move on to the _next_ thing you desire,” Iaon said. “Or else you can tell me about the wine.”

 _—The wine, instantly, of course the wine, right this minute._ “I was, well, concerned… we’ve both been very busy and, who knows, perhaps a little, ah, affected by that last case, and I thought that perhaps—” The God gulped. “That perhaps you, I mean that I might find myself with some, ah, some—”

“Let’s pretend for the moment that _I_ was the one who might find myself with the difficulty,” Iaon said, “and move on.”

 _Oh thankyou thankyou thankyou my dear Iaon—_ “—and so I gave some thought to what might rectify such a situation and I spent a few minutes throwing something together—”

“‘A few _minutes_ ,’” the Prince said. “‘Throwing together’ something that would be indetectable in wine and would also have Great Pan himself on our doorstep the next morning complaining that somebody’d redefined ‘priapism’ behind his back.”

“—well no one could claim that it wasn’t _effective_ , and when an experiment _works_ right there it’s more or less a moral imperative for it to have _been_ done, don’t you see! And it works for immortals as _well_ as mortals, think of all the good that—”

“You _drugged_ me,” said the Prince, and it was meant to come out annoyed but the God could hear him trying to restrain his laughter and _it was all right, it was going to be all right,_ “you daft bloody immortal _wanker_ , you _drugged_ me and made it impossible for me to pee for _nearly two hours_ because it is physically impossible to pee out of an organ that has gone _so hard_ it could be mistaken for _gods-damned Parian marble—”_

“—but you see Iaon, that’s the whole point, think of the _social_ benefits that—”

“Social benefits be buggered and fucked,” the Prince said; and without warning his voice had gone very gentle. “You were just afraid that I might not be able to get it up because of how tired I was, and afraid I might feel bad about that. And you didn’t want me to feel bad.”

 _—and how_ does _he do that?_ the God thought helplessly, torn between pride in his Prince’s gifts and discomfort at not understanding them: _everything laid bare at a stroke and he’s not even afraid of it—_ Or if he was, he just _pushed through it._ That courage again. It had to be met. “Or perhaps,” the God said after a few moments, very low, “perhaps we were both tired. And _either_ of us might have…”

“Felt bad,” Iaon said. “And when there’s no reason for it, of course that’s to be avoided.” He shook his head, and then he smiled: and he ran his hands up the God’s arms, and took hold of them just under the shoulders, and shook him a little. “But not by clandestine drugging,” he said. “Agreed? _No more_ of that.”

The God sighed. “All right.”

“…Though don’t lose the formula.” And Iaon was looking up at him from under his eyebrows and smiling half of a very mischievous smile. “Who knows? Might come in handy some day.”

And it _was_ all right, and the God smiled back, relieved.

“And there was something else as well, wasn’t there,” the Prince said. “So let’s move on to the next thing. But not before I get to do this.” And he reached up and drew the God’s face down to his.

The kiss went on for such a long time, and was somehow different from every single other kiss that had preceeded it. _How does he_ do _that?_ the God managed to think at one point. _How is he always different? And he’s not trying. It just_ happens… Then the kiss swept him away again.

“Overthinking again,” Iaon said some time later, quite breathlessly. “Cut it out. We were moving on to the next thing you desire.”

The God went a touch abashed again, despite the heat that was rising under his skin and in other parts of him. “Yes,” he said. “It was… something we discussed a while ago. And you suggested I should think about it a while, and that when I was quite sure I was ready… I should ask you again.”

“And?”

“I’m asking.” The God took a breath. “Since we came together, my Prince, you’ve been with me in nearly every way one lover can be with another… except for one.”

And he leaned down and said in the Prince’s ear in a whisper that came out even more shivery and hungry than he’d really intended:

_“Let’s go there.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for Chapter 22 can be found [here at the Lotus Room blog](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/34596898223/chapter-22-notes-and-links).


	23. Interlude 2: Of Memory Management (Mortal) and Two Close Encounters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Healer-Prince considers his position(s), fires his weapon to advantage, and crosses a final threshold in company: twice. 
> 
> _Warnings for explicit same-sex intercourse between mortals and Gods (and vice versa); liminal states, comparative anatomy, Physics and muesli, light and mirrors, rampant innuendo, hearts and burning, and Getting A Room; and (at the end of it all) tea._

In his dreams Iaon had been running through post-sunset twilight. And running, and running. Moss-greened cyclopean walls, the huge squared stones veined with crumbly old black mortar, reared up on either side of them. Shadow ran before him, swirling like a cloak in wind: other shadows, snarling, ran at their heels. And in the dream, Iaon thought, rather irrationally: _I can remember a time when if I had a dream like this, it would’ve upset me._

_Not any more!_

And that struck him as so funny that the Prince started laughing, and couldn’t stop. He laughed while he ran, laughed till he wheezed…

And woke himself up laughing. 

Iaon lay staring up into a night of hazy starlight that was partially blocked away from him by a patch of far deeper darkness. It was braced up on its elbows and folded arms, as if it had been so for a little while, and was looking at him with some bemusement, but great pleasure, to judge by that half-seen smile. “Iaon…?”

That _was unusual,_ the Prince thought. “Mmmnh,” he said, lying there and trying to gather his slightly scattered wits from amidst the echoes of his laughter—his pulse slowing now, the tension in his muscles letting go. There were no shadows pursuing them, there was no rush, nowhere to go, nothing to do: they’d done it, it was over. Now Iaon was just lying stretched out on his back, shadow pulled up over him, near-weightless and warm; silent starlight glowing above him and his couchmate, everything still. The God was gazing down at him in that now-familiar dimness, heavy-eyed but with that smile slowly growing as Iaon became more conscious.

“My Iaon.”

“That’d be me,” the Prince murmured, rubbing his eyes. 

“My matchless warrior-Prince,” the God said. “And marksman without peer. You were _extraordinary_.” 

It was an absolute purr of praise, and Iaon simply lay there and luxuriated in it, for whether one was his lover or not, the God’s unqualified praise was a rarity. And apparently he wasn’t done. “Apollo Silverbow has _nothing_ on you. Him and his ‘unerring shafts’? _Hah!”_ The God chuckled one of those dark chuckles; his half-seen smile was ridiculously self-satisfied, as if _he’d_ made that last shot, not Iaon. “And as for your overnight fan the Archeress…!.” Then without warning the Consulting God yawned, a truly silly noise when it came between a verbal gloat and a chuckle that continued the theme on the other side of the yawn. 

The Prince simply lay there and stretched and smiled, for the praise was warranted. The two of them had spent such a long weary time in Elis: frustrating hours stuck in the gilded luxury of the palace there trying to worm _some_ useful information out of the idiot King and his self-serving counsellors, infuriating hours searching dank backstreets and mucky alleys, all of it culminating in that mad dash from isle to isle that left even the Shadowcloak muttering. Iaon had actually _heard_ it, an annoyed growling noise as it bore him and the God through transit after fruitless transit; he’d seen it squint its red collar-eye down to a narrow near-nothing in fury. Not even Hermes had been able to catch up with the kidnapper in full flight, and the Investigator’s normally dogged patience had worn parchment-thin as the hours went by and their quarry slipped away from him, and them, again and again.

But the God’s initially inspired and increasingly brilliant on-the-fly deductions as to which way their quarry would jump next started paying off, bringing them closer and closer to him every time, fury and panic inexorably starting to wear their quarry down. And then had come the final landfall, high atop a rocky outcropping on a tiny islet called Pelagonisos off the west side of Chios, with the brawny ugly kidnapper of King Aithlios’s fiancee perched an easy few hundred cubits away on another outcropping, impossibly out of reach—standing there at a loss for just a breath’s space, working out which way to run next with the young woman he held pinioned, one arm doubled around her throat. Iaon had just happened to come down facing the right way as the God swirled the Cloak off them. And between that breath and the next one, while the God’s head was still turning to follow Iaon’s line of sight, Iaon pulled his new weapon out from where he’d tucked it into the backband of his loinwrap, and leveled it and sighted and fired— 

Iaon grinned in slow fierce satisfaction at the memory. “Now why would Artemis care one way or another?” 

“Word gets around, my Prince. She texted me just now. Wants to see your toy. Wants one herself.”

Iaon shut his eyes again, remembering that shot, seeing it again in his head. No time to waste second-guessing himself, no time to do anything but trust his judgment and the certainty of the thing he held in his hand. And it had been so strange, as he fired, to realize on some impossible level that the trust went both ways: that the weapon itself had been waiting for _him_ to trust _it_ , waiting for a chance to prove itself to him on something more vital than crockery. At such a distance nothing would have been possible with a bow. All Iaon could do was stare across seemingly endless air at the kidnapper’s head, with the poor Princess’s face pushed right up against it, and think, _Not_ that _close, not this first time, you don’t dare. Have to be the shoulder_ — He squeezed the trigger. And the gun _knew_ what he needed, and the bullet sped, and the kidnapper was spun sideways and kicked down onto the stones as brutally as if the Prince had done it himself from kicking distance. 

…Which brought up something else. “I forgot to tell you. It’s called a gun,” Iaon said. 

“A _gun,”_ the God said, trying the word out, lingering over the last consonant a bit. “How do you know?”

“It told me,” said the Prince. “The way the tea did.” He shook his head. “Don’t ask me what it means.” 

And then he sighed, reaching up and over to touch the God’s face, stroking one of those cheekbones with his thumb. “You were a total wreck when we came in,” the Prince murmured, stretching again. “Even if you’d had a name, you wouldn’t have been able to remember it, you were that tired. How’re you even awake now?”

“Might ask you the same,” said the God, after an unusually long pause for him. He slid down onto his side and let his head fall back on the pillows, his eyes drifting shut even as his free arm reached out to gather Iaon close.

The Prince rolled toward the God to slip his own arm around him, and was immediately reminded by his body exactly why else he might be awake besides the sound of his own laughter. “Oooh,” he said, as everything he’d drunk last night when they came in—water mostly, they’d both been absolutely parched—now shifted position inside him and demanded to be immediately let out. _“That’s_ why,” Iaon said, stroking the God’s side gently. “Right back…”

“Mmmmm,” the God said, still smiling slightly, not opening his eyes. 

Iaon rolled back over and slipped off the couch in a gingerly manner, as he was in that state where moving to relieve oneself is nearly as uncomfortable as not moving. Once into the bathroom it took him as long as it would have taken to recite several leisurely hexameters to finish what needed doing, but afterwards he felt almost indescribably better, and was now ready to start thinking about what might happen when he got back to the couch. Once in the Chamber again, though, as the Prince prepared to slip back onto the couch and pull the covers up, he saw that the God lay still on his back, indistinct as always in the dim soft starlight, his mouth a little open; and from it, for the first time ever, Iaon heard a little snore emerge. 

_Another virginity gone,_ Iaon thought, gently amused, and sat down on the couch by the God in silence for a few moments, just looking. _So mine’s a snorer…_

It was still always hard to make out the God in starlight that varied from almost-clear-night to clouded-over hazy and dim. But the beauty could not be doubted, and even in total darkness there were ways it came through: the feeling of a smile against skin, the sound of that deep dark voice lingering over his name… or, seen very close, the silver-edged depths of those eyes. Though they’d fallen shut now, even in this dimness the still sweep of the long dark lashes left Iaon torn between the sweetness of the sight of the God sleeping, peaceful, ever so briefly at rest, and the thought of those eyes open and gazing into his, soft or challenging, amused or fiercely focused, however obscurely seen.

Iaon reached out a hand to touch the pale arm outflung across the shadow-covering, then hesitated as another of those tiny snores came out. _He’s so tired. Let him be._

Very quietly he got up again and went over to a chair that sat in the Chamber’s far corner, past the wardrobe where the God hung his robes and khitons. There Iaon had left a long houserobe the God had brought him, in a deep rusty russet, very soft and belted like the God’s. Iaon wrapped it around him and tied it as he softly went out through the bathroom, carefully closing the door behind him before opening the bath’s door to the light of the rest of the House. 

Everything was quiet, though it wasn’t exactly early: perhaps two hours before noon. “Thalastrae?” the Prince called. 

No answer came back. This wasn’t strictly a surprise; since things changed in the House, the ladies had been a little less evident in the mornings, or (unless their presence was specifically called for) in the evenings when the God and the Prince got in late. Iaon yawned again, rubbed his eyes, wandered through into the sitting room. 

The fire burned warm as always: the sun was high enough now that none was coming straight in the windows, though its light was warm on the garden outside. The hum of the bees down among the roses was so loud that the Prince could hear it even through closed windows. _They’ve been louder lately,_ he thought, and smiled. _Something to do with his state of mind, perhaps? Or mine?_ …But then Iaon had been noticing lately that even in the House’s deepest silences, even (strangely) sometimes in the dead of night, he could still hear something of them, the way the sound of a distant stream or wind in the trees will ever so faintly underrun a very quiet night out in the open, so that you almost think you’re imagining it. _One more mystery,_ he thought: _just the way life goes, now…_

He stretched again, flinched a little—every muscle was sore today, it seemed, after the unrelenting strain of the long chase—and went into the kitchen to fill the kettle. Everything felt a bit strange, as it sometimes did the day after a case; the normality of a quiet sitting room, tea, possibly a little flatbread with some gooseberry jam on it, sat strangely in the mind after the madness of the day before. _Enjoyable, though..._ The Prince sighed as he put tea in the pot, afterwards pulling open the Cupboard That Was Cold and rooting around in it for the milk. For a miracle, there actually was some: if only because the God had been way too busy the past few days to inoculate it with something experimental or do anything else novel to it. “Morning, Heisenberg…”

“Morning, Prince. Any update for me?”

Iaon shook his head. “I keep asking him,” he said, “and he keeps saying ‘I’ll get back to him…’ You all right? Need anything?”

“Wouldn’t mind the last blog entry. I’m one behind.”

“No problem,” the Prince said, went off to get the last tablet containing the text he’d handed off to Westie, and propped it inside the Cupboard. “That all right?”

“Perfect.”

“Get you the new one tomorrow,” said Iaon. “Or maybe the next day. Writing this one’s going to be a chore.”

“Thanks.”

The kettle clicked off, the normal rumble of boiling water going quiet. The Prince shut the Cupboard and turned to pour the iron pot full; put its lid on, then rummaged in another cupboard among the stoneware pots of jam, looking in one of them after another and getting different results each time. _No gooseberry. Does he like that? Must get more. What’s this in the strawberry-tree jam jar? Hmm. No, not putting_ that _on bread._ He pulled the cork stopper off a third one. Instead of pomegranate-seed jelly, it contained a half-dissected toad, or what looked like a toad. _Not exactly a breakfast tracklement, no_. A fourth jar, wider, had had bitter Ch’in-orange conserve in it the week before. Now the Prince unlidded it and wasn’t sure _what_ he was looking at. It looked vaguely furry and grey-green, which wasn’t at all beyond expectation around here, but from the jar came a thin noise like little voices shouting. 

Iaon squinted into the jam pot for a moment, then hurriedly stoppered it up again and put it back where he’d found it. _Who knew I’d get to the point where I’d_ prefer _finding toes,_ he thought. _Never mind. Butter for me this morning, and down to the Tesko later…_

The butter was supposedly an acquired taste, but the Prince had acquired it with some speed after Mrs. Hudson talked him into trying some on that last batch of scones. While the tea brewed he wandered out into the sitting room again, paused for a moment by the window, then leaned back with hands on his lower back and tried to work out that one annoying crick that had been bothering him since yesterday. With a faint pop and quick flash-spasm of the muscle, it came undone. 

Iaon sighed, smiled, glanced around. The God’s desk was still a mess, a scatter of densely-annotated parchments and little scraps of thick soft notepaper and tablets and styli and three different cups of tea, all only partially drunk and one with a stylus in it. Some of the scatter had made its way across to the low table by the couch, in company with yet another tea mug, this one containing a rolled-up piece of papyrus carefully inscribed in ink with some sort of graded scale. _Experiment,_ the Prince thought, bemused. He glanced past it to the sofa, and the blue-red-and-white pillow that was still down at the wrong end of it, and suddenly thought of a quiet dark voice murmuring, “When did you know?”

> …It had come as a surprise. Iaon was used to hearing that voice (by and large) speaking with complete certainty; when questions came out of the God’s mouth, they were usually either rhetorical, or framed as part of an attempt to lead Iaon through a deductive chain. An actual request for information (except at a crime scene) was rare enough to throw the Prince off his stride. 
> 
> _And he hasn’t deduced it,_ the Prince had thought at the time. _Which is unusual, to say the least…so he may be feeling a little sensitive about it._
> 
> Nonetheless he was careful to show no surprise. Iaon simply kept running his fingers gently through the silky dark curls of the head that had been unexpectedly and delightfully laid in his lap while he was sprawled on the sofa with his feet up, crossed at the ankles, on that poor much-abused low table. It had been that one night when they’d been able to escape back to the House for a few hours while the Yarders were still going over a wing of King Aithlios’s palace that the God had deduced dry in a matter of minutes and declared a waste of everyone’s time. The Prince was bone-weary but couldn’t sleep, possibly due to the tea he’d taken refuge in when they’d come in so late: the God was thinking (not that there weren’t a thousand ways that that looked). 
> 
> _When did I know?_ …Iaon thought about it. “You mean, when did I know you were more than you seemed? Always, I suppose. From the first time you visited me. Not that I thought about it consciously, mind you. Or understood what was going on, so soon. But did I know there was some kind of connection? Though I didn’t understand it? Yes.” 
> 
> The shadow-veiled figure tilted his head back a little. “How?” 
> 
> “Well, there was just something unusual in your eyes. As there was with Xanthe. When I started thinking about it, it seemed like it was the _same_ something… which was so strange.”
> 
> “Yet you weren’t afraid.”
> 
> “I told you,” the Prince said, his eyes crinkling with amusement, “you’re not very frightening. Certainly not as a little old smelly herdsman. Definitely not as the Lady Xanthe. Any more than you are now.” And then he smiled differently, and tilted a wry look down at the darkness-veiled face in his lap. “But also, when I palpated your wound that first time, and you passed out and fell over on me? Before you came to all the way, you kind of whimpered a little and then in a way posher accent than before, you said _‘Mummy!’_ So as for _frightening…”_
> 
> _“Oh no.”_ The God’s face creased itself up in dismay and turned to hide itself against Iaon’s belly. 
> 
> “It doesn’t matter. No one heard.”
> 
> _“You_ did!” said the God, wretched. 
> 
> “Yes, and you see how much that bothered me, because look where I _am_ , you great git.” And Iaon stroked a couple of gentle knuckles across the God’s cheek. “I’ve seen you way worse, since. I’ve seen you faceplanted on this sofa with your arse in the air. And lying upside down off it with your hair going every which way on the floor, while you scrape away on your long-necked lyre. And covered with muck from that alley when you tripped—remember that puddle that was at least a cubit deep? And soaked in dwarf pachyderm piss and all grubby with explosive residue. So your oh-so-fragile dignity is safe with _me_ , O Terrible Dark Being Whom The Gods Themselves Fear.” He stretched a little and shifted enough to cross his legs the other way. “…What _was_ that for, by the way? The piss?” 
> 
> “For Science, my Prince.”
> 
> A sigh. “Might have known. Pity we can’t get her in to do the cleaning afterwards.” But Iaon chuckled. He was still getting his brains wrapped around the idea of these “personification” deities, after running into Physics herself the week before last in the dairy aisle down at the Tesko. He’d come away from the encounter no wiser about anything except that Physics did not like fruit in her yogurt, especially not apricots, though she didn’t mind the kind with the muesli in it. _Must ask the Thalastrae what muesli is…_

…“Shall I make tea, Prince?” said one of the voices from the kitchen. 

“Oh, no thank you,” he said, glancing away from the couch, “no need, it’s done. How are you this morning?”

“Very well, thank you!” He saw the pot in the kitchen lift up, a mug float down from one of the shelves, the tea pour out steaming, a splash of milk go in. “Looks like we need more.”

The mug came bobbing out to him. “I’ll go if you like,” Iaon said as he took it. “Can’t believe there’s actually time to do that, now.”

Thalastrae’s voice smiled. “Prince, don’t even think of it. Take a day off! Let us handle things for a bit.” And she chuckled. “Things around the House have been so much quieter for us since you came.” 

“Are you suggesting he’s _easier_ to live with than he used to be?”

Her laughter was affectionate, but ironic. “Believe me, you have _no_ idea…”

“Do we need more jam?” said another Thalastrae from the kitchen. 

“Ideally some without toads in,” Iaon said. “And some that doesn’t shout at me when I open it.”

“On the list…” said a third of them, heading up the stairs with a broom. 

Iaon smiled and made for the stairs himself, heading downward: then paused. “By the way, what’s muesli?”

Laughter from three directions at once. “Met Physics, did you?” said one of the Thalastrae. “We’ll bring you some…” said another. 

The Prince raised his eyebrows and made his way out through the dark door that opened for him. On the doorstep he paused while the door closed itself behind him, looking out at the bright day: clouds scudding by up in the early-autumnal blue, a touch of breeze swaying the tall poplars up the Mount, the Bees humming loudly all around him as they exploited the late-season roses. No need to run anywhere, no darkness, no frustration: peace. 

Iaon let out a long satisfied sigh and sat down on the warm doorstep, had another drink of his tea and reflexively looked over at the millstone-fountain set off to one side. No one was there. _Too early for the drinks run, I guess. Busy Bees…_ But not too busy to notice him. One zipped past his nose, slowed, circled his head once. The Prince turned, trying to see where it was headed, but lost it. When he turned around again he found it had alighted on his knee, a burnished gold-and-black glint against the russet of the robe, and was regarding him with little dark eyes. 

“Good morning,” he said, resting a hand carefully on the side of his knee and putting a finger out to her. The Bee paused for a moment, grooming her antennae with her forefeet and then stroking over her wings with her rear ones, so that sun glanced off them again. Then she took official note of the proffered index finger, tapping it with her antennae before she scrambled up onto it, cocked an eye at Iaon again, and immediately went back to her grooming. 

The Prince looked down at her, amused at his own assumption. _‘She?’ Could be a boy…_ But then females were far in the majority in any hive. The odds were on “she”. Not for the first time, the thought crossed Iaon’s mind: here they were, he and the God, a couple of bachelors almost entirely surrounded by females of one sort or another… Then he chuckled, for though he and the God might have been bachelors in the most conventional sense of the word, there was nothing else conventional about their situation at _all._

The slight breeze dropped off into silence. Everything briefly became so still that the bubbling of the millstone fountain almost seemed loud, and Iaon could even hear the tiny, scratchy _bzt, bzt_ sound of the Bee’s wings as she briefly worked them, groomed, worked them again. He gazed down at her, fascinated. _It’s as if I can hear better these days,_ the Prince thought. _As if being with the God is sharpening my senses._ …And certainly there were some sounds to which he was exquisitely attuned nowadays. The weird soft hissing or belching or bubbling noises from the kitchen. The muttering that came from the bathroom when the God was trying to patch up some small injury without Iaon finding him out and scolding him for taking some silly risk. The sound of the God’s speech, obviously, in its many modes, especially the particular edge it got when something had surprised him in a way he didn’t enjoy: hearing _that_ would in turn bring all Iaon’s other senses to the alert. And other sounds, more evocative. The particular whisper, or very soft sigh, that shadow made when it slid over skin…

> …Last tenday, had it been? Things had been happening so quickly, everything seeming to run together. But that sound, that whisper, and the pale gaze resting on him in the dimness, as the God reached up from where he lay on their couch to tuck the shadows in around Iaon, looking across at him with slight concern. “Are you all right?”
> 
> A pause, a sigh (though not an unhappy one: more ruminative, more wondering). “Sometimes I still can’t believe it, can’t believe it’s all right to say it…”
> 
> “Always. Any hour of the day or night. Never stop saying it.”
> 
> The statement was made so earnestly on the God’s side that it was impossible not to quirk half a sceptical smile at him. “That’ll make casework a bit difficult, don’t you think?”
> 
> “Not at all. Listen, and learn. ‘The victim was obviously dropped from a great height onto the isle of Lemnos, and I love you, Iaon. But of course the physical evidence has undergone a cleanup which, though enthusiastic, was also pitifully ineffective and has left numerous useful clues… which all of _you_ have missed except for Iaon, who is brilliant and amazing for a mortal and whom, by the way, I love—” 
> 
> “You and your posh grammar.”
> 
> “—and if the lot of you would only open your eyes and stop desperately passing your one brain cell back and forth between you like the Graeae with their eye, I’m talking to _you_ Andreidês, and merely use the admittedly downscale monkey-model intellects bestowed on you by some kindly but sadly overhopeful power, you would see what Iaon has already seen, and did I mention that I love you Iaon, that the site where the body fell is completely bereft of any ichor spatter but the minions who attempted to clean it up missed the crevices in the rock over here, and the residue’s exposure is already consonant with that of a spill that happened between nine and eleven days ago, so there you go, just find out what minor deities had a day off from work during that period and which one was flight-capable, even you lot can handle that, case solved, and Iaon, it being indubitably the case that I love you, why don’t we just slip over behind this convenient boulder where I plan to lavish the attentions of my gifted tongue on your wholly delectable manhood—’” A pause. “Iaon, stop it now, you _said_ it was gifted.”
> 
> Giggling. “It is. It’s not that. Just, oh my dear sweet God, I still can’t get it out of my head. Hermes’s face when he finally copped on…”
> 
> More laughter, followed by a fair imitation of Argeiphontês’ gravelly accent. “’Will you two for the Fates’ sake _get a room_ before you put my blood sugar so far through the roof I can’t enjoy my lunch? And just look at the poor snakes now, never mind _their_ next meal, you’re gonna put them off their _last_ one and this was a clean khiton this morning! They get sick on me and I’m sending _you_ the cleaning bill, I mean it now, are you two even _listening_ to me?—’” 
> 
> More giggling. “And who knew you could do voices? You _do_ have hidden talents.” 
> 
> “More than one, I’m told.”
> 
> The giggling slid into a gasp; then another one. “Yes. Yes you do. Oh please.”
> 
> “Say it again.”
> 
> “My love. My beautiful love. _Please.”_
> 
> “Yes. Whatever you ask… _yes.”_
> 
> _“Ohh…”_
> 
> And then a little hesitation, strangely different from the roguish humour of just a few moments before. “But are you sure? I might not really be all that beautiful.”
> 
> A stunned pause. “Excuse me?”
> 
> “I mean, Prince, you’ve been around Olympus, admittedly on the quiet, but you’ve seen what other Gods look like. Whatever I have, it’s all right, I suppose, but it’s not exactly a conventional look for a God, is it, I mean…”
> 
> Did he actually sound _uncertain?_ About _that?_ It was unthinkable, it was _wrong—_ “Stop.”
> 
> “…and in the dark you can’t really—” 
> 
> _“Stop._ How do you think I could possibly have doubts about this? When I can _touch_ you?” Just the sound of breathing now, and another sound Iaon wouldn’t have been so attuned to before: the tiny soft whisper of hands sliding across skin. “ _These_ tell me things that no darkness could keep from me. Ever.”
> 
> A soft gasp as the breathing under those hands sped up. 
> 
> “Darkness is what hands were made for. And lips. And tongues. This is where they come into their own. And master of it though you are… you never noticed.”
> 
> “Until you, my Iaon.”
> 
> “And you’d better never forget. You’re _beautiful_. Don’t you ever dare doubt it, you utter arse.”
> 
> “Goodness, Prince Iaon, the sheer honey-tongued ravishment of your language: I’m like to swoon with it. Plainly romance is not dead.”
> 
> “Plainly.” And then another sound, only soft for a moment, as half-immaterial shadow-covering got flung away. Then the gasping turned to smothered laughter and snorting and grunts of exertion as a sudden wrestling match broke out, followed by the _thump_ of two bodies tumbling off the couch together into a fog of more shadows that roiled and fled for the edges of the room, driven there by gales of slightly bruised merriment…

_…Bzt, bzt,_ said the little voice from down by Iaon’s knee. 

The Prince looked down at the Bee sitting on his finger, who had now finished her tidying and had cocked her head up at him again. For a moment he simply sat and rested in her gaze as he would have in the God’s: though at least with the God he had a fighting chance of understanding some of what was going on behind the eyes. Carefully he lifted the finger, watching the Bee to see if she minded: but she clung to his finger and held still, and Iaon brought her up to where he could look at her most closely without losing focus. 

“Do you have any idea what a miracle it is for me to be here?” the Prince said under his breath, when they were eye to eye. “How amazing all this is… _he_ is? The chases and the captures. The brain and the gun. The mornings and the evenings, and the room where it’s always night…” Iaon shook his head a little: the little eyes moved with his movement, watching him. “And if you do… then _how_ the hell do you know? _Because you’re a bee.”_

She tilted her head right over and looked at Iaon almost exactly at a right angle for several seconds: then snapped her head back around to normal and brought her wings up to speed. In a little whispery downdraft the Bee lifted off from his finger, hovered just a moment longer to look at him, and then took off down the garden path. Iaon watched her go, shook his head, then took another swig of his tea and realised it had gone cold. 

The thought of more tea was more or less immediately dislodged as Iaon stood up and stretched, feeling the ache in his muscles again. _A nice hot bath, perhaps,_ the Prince thought. Though the God had had one late last night when they got in—fastidious as he was, it was rare for mere weariness to keep him out of the bath when he came home besmirched with the aftereffects of a case—Iaon had been too bone-tired to join him. _And after that… who knows?_ Because you never _did_ know around here. Making plans in the House was futile, and if you should be lucky enough to have a good idea, the smart thing to do was act on it immediately, before something happened to delay it: a murder, a kidnapping, a God experimenting on you or dragging you off to make love. _Not that the two are mutually exclusive…_

Half an hour later Iaon had mostly put this line of thought aside, as he was was nose-deep in steaming hot water and had become busy puzzling at something else entirely. The God’s bathroom, palatial though it was, looked ordinary enough at first glance. Four walls, tile, the sink, the shower, the sanitary facilities, and of course the bath itself. This was a handsome affair made of beautifully smoothed and polished dark granite, nearly as long and broad as the God’s couch, and sunk into the floor of the room. On the inside, the bath was angled up at both ends so that one might comfortably lie back in it, exactly as if against the gently-upsloping back of a couch: this being what Iaon was doing at the moment. The water was just slightly cloudy with a dose of one of the bath essences that the Prince had discovered early on and come to prefer, something scented of cypress and upland pine; but the dark green fragrance was not at all on his mind. 

He slid one foot up the curve of the far end of the bath, a little way out of the water, and stared at it, thinking, _How is it that I fit perfectly in here?_ Because he’d not only seen the God in the bath often enough before they became physically intimate, but he’d been _in_ the bath _with_ the God more than once of late, and the bath was always long enough for the God to stretch out comfortably— 

> …Indeed that last joint soak had been a very silly one. There’d been some wine involved, yes; that was what had kept Iaon from noticing anything about the bath proper except its perfection as a place to experiment (on the God) in using some of the bath oils for purposes likely unintended by the original manufacturers. He still couldn’t remember the exact circumstances surrounding their departure from the bath and arrival in the Chamber and on the couch; but he did remember, smiling fondly, the God whispering into the side of his neck, with a kiss before it and a kiss after. “ _Kednos…_ ” 
> 
> The Prince’s mouth curved into a smile. “You know what normally goes with that word in the poems,” he said. “ _’Kednos alokhon’_.’ ‘Trusty bedfellow…’”
> 
> “But of course I can’t say that.”
> 
> A pause. “What? Why not?”
> 
> “Because this isn’t a bed.” And that lovely chuckle went rumbling again through the body he held in his arms, for easily the twentieth time since they’d first lain down together. _When did he ever laugh this much before? And why am I caring, exactly? Because I can’t get enough of it._ All the Prince could do was hold his love closer and thank whatever powers were over both of them that he was here, that his God was here, and that he was alive and living to be in love like this: with a God who for the first time in his life felt free to laugh like that. 
> 
> And to be a prat. “Come on now, stop splitting hairs.”
> 
> “A couch, my Prince. Look at it. The end slopes up. Beds don’t do that.”
> 
> “Pedant. I’ve accidentally fallen in love with the God of Pedants. Or the Pedant of the Gods. Never mind… I’ll deal with _you_ shortly.”
> 
> “Deal with me,” whispered the other. “Oh yes. Please, please yes, ‘deal with me’ again.” Another of those chuckles. “But it is impossible for you to do that… _shortly.”_
> 
> Soft laughter. “When you… _ohh…_ put it that way… perhaps you have a point.”
> 
> “Of course I have one. Look at it pointing. Do pay _attention_ , Iaon. There’s nothing like first-hand evidence…”
> 
> Laughter: two sets of it, amid the splashing and the touching and then the silence that fell as touching trumped words; though the smiling, _that_ never seemed to stop…

_…So much silliness that night,_ Iaon thought. But to hear his God—almost always before so tightly wound, so fiercely restrained—now able to let himself a little off the leash: it was worth everything. True, he normally wore his power as a God surprisingly lightly… partly, Iaon suspected, as a courtesy to his housemate. But every now and then something a little dark or mysterious came up for consideration: as now. Now Iaon wiggled his toes, which lay flat against the water-warmed stone, and tried to understand how it was possible for a bath to be two different sizes. 

_Probably,_ he thought, _the same way the Chamber can be bigger than it needs to be. Or have either two or three or four walls, depending._ He sighed, slid further down into the water. _Or be full of darkness that’s alive, that’s part of him somehow. Shadows that are more than just darkness, that don’t depend on a lamp, or the sun..._

> …and perhaps it had been a touch odd that the Chamber had been so full of starlight, that one night when the subject came up, though it was something entirely different that had been under discussion. “The sun? Why should I care about the sun?” the God said, with surprisingly good-natured scorn. “It’s hardly important…”
> 
> Iaon lay with his head pillowed on the God’s shoulder and his hand over the God’s heart: his lover’s arm was wrapped around him, that hand absently and idly stroking his back. “As if it even _matters_ whether Apollo goes around the world or the other way about,” the God said, his voice dropping to a lazy rumble now. “Daylight, moonlight, they’re local business. They only matter insofar as they affect how well we do the Work, or as timing evidence for when something happened. What light matters to _me_ comes from much further afield.”
> 
> He stretched, looking up toward the ceiling. That evening’s starlight sharpened the shadows that fell across the God’s face, so that to the Prince he looked more than usually dangerous, caught between that cold faint light and the darkness. “The older the light, the more powerful the shadow cast by it,” the God said softly. “Not holy Nyx herself who made the sky knows how old some of that light is, or where it comes from: beyond Chaos, beyond the abyss that gave birth to the most ancient Gods. Faint it may be, but there’s a great strength in it, and more in the dark void through which it moves. It knows secrets, that light. And for good or ill, no God but I can master the shadows it casts…”
> 
> For a couple of breaths’ space Iaon could think of nothing to say. There were occasional times like this with the God that left the Prince so deeply or obscurely moved that he couldn’t find an immediate response: when an odd dark gravity descended on his lover, a seriousness that garbed him like the darkness he wore beyond the Chamber. The sense of still, brooding power that accompanied such moments always brought the hair up on the back of Iaon’s neck as he was reminded that for all the joy he shared with his housemate, all the passion and laughter and excitement, the frowns and the foolishness, the abrasiveness and the derring-do… that this was a God indeed, born of powers he could not fathom and grounded in depths he couldn’t plumb. 
> 
> The shiver of yet another such reminder now brushed down Iaon’s back, raising gooseflesh there. He twitched a little: not in unease, but awe. “Should you be telling me such things?” the Prince murmured, looking up. 
> 
> The God glanced at him in slight surprise. “If not you, then whom?”
> 
> Iaon’s mouth twitched toward a half-smile. “That posh grammar again.”
> 
> “You’re in the Work with me, Iaon. Who knows, some day you may need to know this. But whether you do or not, I trust you.” The dark head bowed to his. “Before, I thought trust was something fools did. Or that corpses _had_ done.” And warmth whispered in his ear, more to be felt than heard. “I never knew the truth of what it meant until you came to teach me…”

…And shadows had become a non-issue for a good while after that. _But now,_ Iaon thought, slowly boosting himself up out of the water… _now, time to go deal with them. And the other thing that’s coming._ For he could feel it, waiting for him in the Chamber with the shadows. 

***

The Prince dried off, wrapped himself in the robe again, and touched the little lever that darkened the bathroom: then slipped into the Chamber and shut the door behind him. 

As usual, it took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside—though this too was happening faster than it ever had before he came to live in the House. _And why would that be?_ Iaon wondered. Was it some gift of the God’s? Something the Chamber itself did? _…Or mere eagerness?_ That thought made him laugh at himself, if it was true. But why not? This room had become more than important to him: it was vital, a part of him now, a place Iaon couldn’t have borne not being able to enter. Even if there were some strange things in it…

Like the little phalanx of formless knee-high shadow-shapes all arrayed between him and the more indistinct wall on the far side, all of them somehow looking at him, though they had no eyes to do it with. 

“Now then,” Iaon said. “All of you just calm down, all right? Come on over here.” And he sat down on the edge of the couch, and waited. 

They just looked at the Prince for a good while. This was normal behavior, as it had been from the very beginning when he’d noticed them first—when he started slipping into the Chamber now and then to sit quiet by himself and try to get to grips with the wonder of everything that had happened to him. He’d been looking up into that hazy starlight a for a good while before first feeling their regard… and when he finally really saw them looking at him, he’d been forced to admit that the God was right: _you see, but sometimes you really_ don’t _observe._ There the shadows were, crowding into the corners, curious, a little uncertain… just watching him. 

When he realized what was happening and got past the initial shock, Iaon had known instinctively what to do. The shadows were shyer even than the Bees: at first not for any coaxing would they come to him. So Iaon would simply slip into the Chamber, sit on the couch, and ignore them exactly as he’d done in his childhood when dealing with some little animal he’d treated for its hurts. _Sit quiet, don’t stare at it, let it come to you in its own time…_ And soon enough, so the shadows did. One day while he sat on the couch something touched Iaon’s leg, insubstantial, like a curl of the darkest fog imaginable, yet warm. He’d briefly felt this touch before, all over, when the God had first wrapped his arms around him to bring him into the Chamber. So on feeling it again Iaon sat, without reacting, and let that boldest of the watching shadows just be there, leaning against his leg as if it was one of the Palace’s hunting dogs let in on a cold night to sit by the fire and be petted. 

When the shadow had been there a good few moments, Iaon moved just enough to look down at it and smile. Though it had no eyes, he could tell it was looking at him, uncertain and wistful, like a puppy unsure of its welcome. So the Prince then first did what he now always did: slowly and carefully put a hand down and slipped it into that warm darkness. “…It’s all right,” he’d said: “you’re his. And _I’m_ his. So don’t you be afraid of me. We’re on the same side.” Seconds later, very faintly, like a shivering along his nerves, he’d felt the soft, shy, answering purr. 

Now as then, it didn’t happen immediately, but soon enough all around his knees the shadows came crowding in. As always, because they never really seemed to get past the shyness, Iaon spent a little while reassuring them—sliding his fingers through their dark warm near-intangibility as if they were the God’s hair, petting them and stroking them as best he could and telling them they were very very _good_ shadows. Within a very short time the resultant purring around him was practically making the couch vibrate. 

Iaon almost hated to tear himself away from them. Sometimes he wondered if the shadows were an obscure expression of something buried in the God’s mind—a shyness and uncertainty he dared not openly allow himself for the Work’s sake, or for some other far more private reason. _Like that silliness about possibly not being beautiful._ He sighed. _Idiot._

“All right, you lot,” Iaon finally said to the crowd of faceless darknesses pressed up against the couch and his legs, “I have to go find him now. He’s in there?”

The shadows slid away from Iaon, opening the way to the far wall, the one that shimmered a little when one’s gaze held on it steadily, showing a hint of a different mix of light and shadow behind. 

“Good. Thanks,” Iaon said. He got up off the couch and headed for the wall: paused a moment before it, as always, and then went on through. 

The feeling of the barrier breaking across his face and body was strange, no less so than when the God had brought him through into the Chamber the first time; a sense of somehow being outside the House, beyond its boundaries, impossible as that seemed. _Though I’m learning that ‘impossible’ isn’t a smart word to use where the God’s concerned…_ In any case, the Prince closed his eyes against the touch of the barrier as he moved through. Instantly, even through closed lids, he could see the light on the far side changing as he entered, the moonlight there drawing clouds over itself and fading down into a dimness more in line with that of the Chamber. 

As he stepped through to the other side the Prince paused for a moment, eyes still shut, in case anything else needed to change in response to him. Not for the first time, certainly not for the last, Iaon wondered about the true reasons for the God’s need to keep himself so hidden, even here in his most intimate place. He was sure he didn’t know the whole truth of it, perhaps never would, but it wasn’t a subject he intended to press. Far more important to Iaon was the sense of a vulnerability about his God—the feeling of some secrecy too important to cast aside, even in the intensity of first love. _When he wants to tell me… he’ll tell me. We’re still so new together. What matters, here and now, is_ him. 

And there the God stood: veiled in his shadow again, arms dramatically upraised as he marshalled his memories, a storm of light and colour blurring around him. For a short time the Prince stood there and watched him at this work, then slipped up behind the God, slid arms around him. “Couldn’t sleep?…”

For a while they stood there together in the moonlight, talking, touching, chaffing with one another about the past and the present, gently sparring; drugged wine and denials, affection and embarrassment, the dance of reticence and desire, but moving in new figures now. The God had quickly become much bolder with Iaon in terms of physical intimacy—no surprise there, swift study as he always was at anything he felt worthy of his attention. Yet in some ways his reserve was deepening; as if the God was coming to a better understanding of how lovers might possibly harm one another should they handle each another ungently. Sometimes of late Iaon could faintly feel the tension of the two impulses pulling against one another in his beloved, as a gesture in air or a stroke across skin went still or shifted itself in some new direction. They’d been left with little time to talk about it in these recent days, especially as regarded one particular issue. But as Iaon felt the God put his lips down by his ear, he knew what was coming. 

“…Let’s go there.”

Iaon looked up into the God’s eyes through the veiling shadow. The subdued moonlight here brought up the silver-grey of them, but the darkness at their hearts was growing darker. Iaon reached up to touch the God’s face. “You’re remembering what I said—”

“I remember everything you say.”

Iaon nodded at that, not merely because it was most likely true. “And I did say that many never do this,” he said, staying even-voiced about it, even casual: though the issue was anything but casual for him. “It’s a matter of taste.”

“If you’re going to tell me it’s an acquired one,” the God said, “I have to at least have a chance to acquire it.” And then he looked away. “But Iaon—once or twice— _before_ —I heard you thinking…”

“Of?”

“How it was to have someone inside you.” The God looked into the Prince’s eyes almost shyly, his own eyes now even more swiftly darkening, moon or no moon. “When they mattered to you most. When you wanted them closest, when they wanted you deep. Or you, them. I thought…” The God stopped again, abashed: an increasingly infrequent look from him. “Oh, Iaon,” he said then, so softly, “I want that. It’s where you should be.”

Iaon drew him close, kissed him long and softly. “Come then,” he said, and took the God’s hand, their fingers interlacing as he tugged him toward the Chamber. “No plans for anything else this afternoon, I take it?”

“If I had any,” the God said, raising his voice to be sure not only the Palace of Thought but the whole House took note, _“they are canceled.”_

The walls of the Chamber shivered a bit in acknowledgment as they passed through. Or it might have been anticipation, for Iaon had begun to note how the Chamber mirrored its master’s moods, and the slight tremor of the God’s hand in his. He knew that tremor well, and what it meant. 

“Wine, my God?”

A nod. “Yes.”

A little quick, the answer. _So, a touch of nervousness there. …As if I don’t have one myself._ The intensity of simply kissing the God could be overwhelming sometimes, the sweet touch of the divine so unconsciously and effortlessly drowning merely mortal sensation in its power. What was to come now would see them far more deeply engaged. _And after that…_ The Prince smiled, though again with a slight tremor of anticipation. After that, his quick study wouldn’t wait long before wanting to prove his mastery and share himself with Iaon the same way…

His breath caught; his small hairs raised with twinned awe and hunger. _But soon enough for that._ In the meantime wine was fetched, and a few supplies gathered together. And after that, some while was spent lounging leaned up together on the couch, the God and the mortal trading the rich warm taste of the wine back and forth on ever-deepening kisses. There was a certain sense of ceremonial about this, a not-unpleasant touch of solemnity on the delight: for both of them knew this was a holy thing, the prospect of god and mortal in deepest embrace. And yet there was a feeling trembling about the back of Iaon’s mind that there might be something else, something _more_ , waiting in the wings. _One thing more,_ the echo said in his mind: his voice, the God’s voice. _Just one thing more…_

_After_ this _? What might that be?_

The poets had no help for Iaon here; any message he could readily recall was ambiguous. _No God’s embrace is ever barren,_ a poet reported one deity saying to his paramour. Iaon had a last sip or so of wine and put the glass aside. _That could mean all kinds of things. And it’s not like even a God is going to get me_ pregnant _. There are lots of other ways to be quickened. …But never mind the poets._ As the God dealt with his own glass and turned again to his Prince, drawing him close, Iaon smiled into those beautiful eyes, kissed his beloved one more time, and then with hands and mouth slowly began to work his way lower. _Because Homer himself, if he was sane, would toss the Muses out of his bed and sell his poetic gifts straight down the river to be where I am right now…_

—poised over that lean chest, taking a nipple gently between his teeth, stroking the other with one hand and feeling it go tight beneath his fingers as the first one hardened; then sliding downward again after a little, Iaon’s lips brushing slow across the smooth tight warmth of the God’s belly. There he paused to simply feel the warm hands that were stroking through his hair and down his neck and shoulders, lingering softly over the scar to let the Prince know that it was loved as much as any other part of him. Iaon shivered in hunger as his hardness grew, as the heat bloomed in him, prickling under his skin in waves, settling low, growing. He slipped his tongue into that lovely deep omphalos one more time in smiling reminder of another time on this couch. _It’s rather like something one might do elsewhere. One circles around… then dips in…_

 _I remember everything you say._ The God smiled, moaned softly, writhing in anticipatory hunger; all those taut muscles tensing, loosing, tensing again. _“Meliglossos…”_

“Only ever so for you now,” Iaon murmured. He kissed again, there: breathed long and warm. “…A question, my God.”

“Ask…”

“In a little while now… face down might be easier for you, as a first time. Face up—less comfortable: more of a challenge, perhaps.”

A graceful long-fingered hand reached out in the near-dark to touch the Prince’s cheek. “When have we ever turned away from a challenge, my Prince?” said the God. Then more softly he added: “And why would I not want to look Love in the face when he enters?”

Iaon bowed his head, flushing warm: nodded. He kissed the God’s navel a sweet brief farewell and moved downward once more toward the erect warmth waiting for him, closing his eyes a moment as he slid his cheek against the hot velvety heft of that long and graceful manhood, turning his face to press his lips against it. _So very hard,_ Iaon thought, breathing in the scent trapped here and intensifying in the soft dark curls he nuzzled into—dark honey and smoke and the bitter note of rue dominated in this place by something less easily identifiable, more personal and profound. 

Memory hung all about that scent for Iaon, evoking another: the first time the God’s ecstatic release had flooded his mouth. It wasn’t that it tasted so different from a mortal’s seed. But as the Prince swallowed down the gift, his world had briefly whited out in an astonishing rush of bliss—thought and sensation all overwhelmed, as if the God’s irresistible outrush of pleasure and his sheer shattering joy had become Iaon’s as well. The wonder had grown easier to manage with time, but its approach always filled Iaon with a kind of delectable dread. And now soon enough he’d be crossing yet another threshold, something new and untried. What was it going to feel like when _his_ turn came, when he felt that sweet heat filling him from within, deep-pressed into the most private part of him on the thrust of the God’s desire?… 

_Soon now. But first…_ Iaon slid lower still, pausing just briefly to kiss his way down to and over the softness of the God’s sac, nibbling gently at the skin over each of his balls and sucking each separately into his mouth—for they were of noble proportions—while the God groaned in soft delight. The Prince smiled, caught his breath. “Turn now?” he whispered. 

The God caught his breath too. He turned and laid him down, exposing that long sleek back and the beautiful plush arse into which it flowed. Iaon lowered his head, his slow hungry excitement building, to the deep cleft that hid desire’s most private portal. There he paused just long enough to master himself; then, having spread the vista open a little with his hands, concentrated on breathing in the God’s dark fragrance and breathing out hungry warmth, until the gateway’s pucker sweetly shivered with it, until the God groaned with it, and groaned again. _“Iaon…”_

“Yes,” Iaon breathed, watching the shivering for a moment more, savoring a shiver of delight of his own. “Always yes.” And at last he lowered his lips to delicately brush, to kiss. Well Iaon knew what it was to be kissed so, in some place where one was sure to the bottom of his heart that no one would ever really want to touch him, least of all with their mouth. The God had already given Iaon that incomparable gift any number of times; those warm soft lips pressed to the Prince’s awful scar—in Iaon’s eyes so torn and ugly a thing—had brought it more healing than any hundred physicians could. The God in turn had his shynesses, some of them strange side effects of his beauty: places where all his calm arrogant self-assurance failed him far more completely than it would have done for anyone less perfectly handsome. This was one, and (Iaon thought) the only thing that had made his God wait this long to move past his hesitation. 

But waiting was over now. A long while Iaon lingered there, lapping gently, slipping his tongue in softly at first, then more deeply, while above him the God gasped in increasingly impatient pleasure. Slowly the portal began to ease, warmed, loosening, growing more welcoming, as the God’s responses acquired a fiercer edge, less patient, more hungry. “Iaon. _More…!”_

“Yes,” Iaon breathed against the opening warmth. “Absolutely… more.” And for just a few moments longer he teased the God with more tongue until the voice above him was reduced to a wordless passionate growl. Then, then only, did Iaon pull away, rising just enough to get his knees under him, and reach down to brush the place he’d been kissing with a single gentle finger.

The growl instantly shifted back to a moan, almost as if surprised, as the finger began to tease and circle. Iaon broke the slow soft rhythm only long enough to dip into the unguent-jar that he’d laid by earlier, and then turned his attention back to the matter at hand. The God pushed against him, pushed again, and Iaon smiled and very slowly slipped the first joint of that finger in. 

Some moments were spent just letting it be there, letting the surroundings get used to its presence. “All right?” the Prince whispered. 

After a second, in answer the God made that low “Mmmmm…” sound deep in his throat: then pushed once more. 

Iaon smiled half a smile, waited; slid the finger’s end slightly out, slightly in, in time with the God’s breathing. “Turn again?” he murmured. 

The God turned to lie once more on his back, lips parted, eyes closed, knees bent, thighs sweetly fallen open. Iaon moved forward a bit between the God’s legs; then slowly he slipped his finger in deeper, and deeper yet, with an eye to discovering whether other matters inside a God were as they were with mortals.

Breath taken softly… and again… and then the God’s eyes flew open in the dark as the latest breath was taken very sharply indeed: a sound of stunned delight that was entirely new, entirely different from any he’d made before. _“What was that?!”_

Iaon smiled the rest of that smile. “Nobody’s quite sure,” he said. “There’s just a little something in there that, when you find it… if you touch it the right way…” He touched it again, the right way, and watched in satisfaction as the God’s back arched and he made that sound again. “Yes,” the Prince said, entirely gratified; “like that. Good to know you have those too. Be a terrible thing if only mortals had them. You’d be missing out something shocking…”

“Shocking…” A gulp, a happy gasp. “Shocking is what that is!”

“Enjoyably so, I hope.” 

“Oh, Iaon! What you did there, that was—that was _good.”_

It was always a sign that things were going well when the God was reduced to such simplicities in his speech. “Good,” the Prince said. “Onward, then.”

And slowly they moved onward together under the starlight, Iaon gradually teaching the God’s body how to open for what was to come, finger by slick finger, while lips sometimes met and sometimes touched gently here and there…

“Iaon.”

“Quite soon, my God…”

_“A little sooner please?!”_

“Some things can’t be rushed.”

“I’m a _God,_ Iaon, I’m not made of cobweb _nnnggghhh!_ Sweet Heaven about us, _Iaon—!”_

“Very soon now, as I said.”

“You did that on purpose!”

“Why, my dear God, the very thought…”

_“Ohh!”_

Lips smiled, touched, stroked; breath rushed out, warm, and gasped in again in much-delayed desire. “But as it happens…just this once, you were right.”

_“Just this once?”_

Iaon laughed. Slowly he leaned up over his divine lover, gazing down into starlit eyes gone almost wholly dark. “Now,” he said, hardly louder than a breath, as he pressed himself close, and the way into his beloved gave slightly before him, warm, waiting. “Feel me there?”

“Iaon.” A whisper matching his. “Yes.”

“Ready?”

No answer but a nod, and the dark deep hungry gaze of eyes locked on his. 

Iaon trembled, slid himself slowly a little way inward. 

And _oh,_ the warm silken smoothness, the exquisite soft-stroking snugness he found ensheathing him; the absolute perfection of it, as if someone had taken the measure of him—or of the God—and built them for each other. On that very first tentative inward stroke the sheer overwhelming delight of the sensation wrung a low cry from Iaon, and a shudder of ecstasy he knew was just the harbinger of much more yet to come. The God moaned too, and reached out to Iaon and slid arms around his waist, and then lower, giving him no chance to indulge any urge to go slow or brace against sliding deeper. “Closer,” the God whispered, “my Iaon, I want you _closer_ , I want you as close as you can be—” 

_“Yes,”_ was all Iaon could say, and abandoned himself to his body’s and his heart’s and his God’s desire, sinking deeper, letting himself be drawn closer, second by sweet second, until finally hot hungry perfection had sheathed him in itself right to his root, and he pressed inward and there was absolutely nowhere else to go, to be, than right here where he was _—_

In the darkness, out of the heart of that hushed moment, came a whisper—astonished, unbelieving. “Oh, Iaon… is that your _pulse_ I’m feeling?” 

“Yes. I’ve felt that... Yes.”

And then the sound of the God’s voice going rough, catching on a gasp, but not one of pain: of joy. “This is right. So right. How can _anything_ be this right.” 

Iaon was working hard at his own breathing, trying not to drown in the sensation of being surrounded by the divine… but also drowning deep in his own delight as he watched the face beneath him, even in that dim starlight, move and change, transported. For the moment Iaon had no answer but to bury his face against the hand the God had reached up to him, plant a long kiss in his palm, and breathe. 

That hand slid down to Iaon’s chest, spread against it. The God’s eyes found Iaon’s again, and something about them glinted brighter in the starlight than it had before. “The right place for my heart to be… is inside me.”

Whatever Iaon’s breath had been about to do, it lost the plot; and the backwash of the deep pang of tenderness that struck through him then, as potent as any pain, welled up all unexpected in Iaon’s eyes. All he could think to do now was hold his God between his hands and start, carefully, to move, using every few pairs of heartbeats as a guide for the rhythm, while trying to blink his eyes clear enough to watch his beloved’s face. 

Even in the dimness it was an image of transfiguration by passion, the God’s head thrown back, back arching, arms outflung and fingers gripping at the couch’s dark softness, or rising to wind around Iaon, fingers gripping him hard enough to bruise. The God was never a silent lover; laughter and whispers of delight and teasing growls and drawls of dry humor were no strangers to their couch when he and Iaon made love. Yet here and now the God seemed increasingly submerged in a kind of still wonder that nothing broke except murmurs of pleasure, moans of amazement or hunger, soft cries of Iaon’s name. Iaon could only concentrate on holding him tight as they rocked together, intent on not losing himself entirely to the power of his God’s overflowing pleasure and hunger. _Anchor him,_ something said inside Iaon. _Hold him fast…_

But that was easy. There was nothing Iaon wanted more to do than wrap himself about the God, himself all enwrapped—sounding those depths that his lover had laid open to no other being in Heaven or Earth, concentrating on filling them as beautifully as he could; being his heart in the physical way, praying he would always be able to do it in every other way his dear God needed. “Inside you now for always, love,” Iaon whispered when he could trust his voice again. “Never before with anyone else. Never again with anyone after.” Because it was true, what he’d said when all this wonder started: that virginities came in all shapes and sizes, and this one was his as perhaps none other had ever been before. Bits of his body might have been inside other beings at one point or another, but _he_ had never been inside one until now. …And because it was settled at last: he was in the place to which he had always been coming, with the one to whom he had been meant to come; there would be no others. 

Yet as the God’s eyes sought his out for a moment before falling shut in response to another flood of ecstasy, the Prince saw in his face, just for a second, even in this darkness, a flicker of something. There, and gone on the next stroke, as pleasure wiped it away. 

_Uncertainty_. 

_Gone now—_

But an instant later Iaon understood it. Deep at the heart of the way the God worked was the habit of never trusting initial evidence, or any first answer, but always unraveling it and poking at it until he was _sure_ , until total certainty allowed him to progress to the next issue. Their intimacy had been deepening over past days, no question. And this first blast of what was proving the profoundest rapture yet had knocked the God’s ruthless reasoning facilities briefly off track. But that splendid, dangerous, unstoppable mind was fighting back now, afraid of what happens when two are on the cusp of becoming one: trying to creep back toward dominance, edging toward the point where sooner or later it would look at Iaon and even in _this_ situation start taking apart what the two of them had, searching it for weaknesses. _And how many flickers like this have passed me by, since our first night in the Chamber?_ Iaon thought. _Because I was so deep in my own happiness, I forgot what might be working against his._

Then it was—as with every sweet-stroking thrust Iaon’s own heat and hunger kept rising in him, balancing against the God’s like a eagle balancing wide-winged on an updraft— _then_ it was at last that the thought that had been trying to find its way through the shadows at the back of his mind slipped through. _I’m not… not the_ only _gift I alone can give him. Not just this way._

_I can give him one thing more._

Iaon gasped, swallowed, his mouth gone dry, his stroke slowing a touch as the back of his mind rose up and started suggesting all the ways this might possibly go wrong. _But still… If it goes right. If it goes as it might._

The Prince swallowed again, managing it better this time, and gazed down at the God’s face. His head was thrown back once more, eyes closed, mouth open, gasping in the intensity of sensation. Iaon kept moving, and gently stroked a hand down that long body, waiting for his lover’s eyes to open. 

At last they did, the God’s hands squeezing Iaon’s hips, then thrown up and back in happy abandon to clutch at the pillow behind his head. “Got an idea,” Iaon said softly. 

It was as if the God actually had to _think_ about what to say before he could get it out. “Your ideas… tend to have merit,” the God said, pushing hungrily up against him on the stroke.

Iaon swallowed again, hoping that was true. “Come here.”

“Oh, my sweet Iaon—” The words were halfway to a laugh, gentle but unbelieving. “How can I be any _more_ here—”

“This way.” Bracing himself up on his dominant hand, Iaon slipped the other up beside the God’s head, where his own hand was flung up, clutching at the cushion. “Take my hand.”

The God looked at him with more of that uncertainty; then laced his fingers through the Prince’s. 

“Come across the threshold,” Iaon said, very soft. 

The God stared. “What. Are you— Iaon, how, what do you—”

“Will you come?” the Prince said. Unnerved as he was, the usual delight in the possible danger had started singing in his blood—busy as most of that might seem to be in his nethers. He was on the crest of that hill again with his thirty spearmen, on the cliff again at Mount Aroania, on the cobbles again in Aegina as the amphisboena crouched to leap at his throat. He was ready; but all he could do now was move gently, keeping up the rhythm, and wait. 

The God looked at Iaon almost in shock. Then, slowly, he let his eyes fall closed, took a great breath— 

And as that breath went out there he was with Iaon, inside him, as it had been for them before. But this time they were far closer together, so that the Prince could feel the warmth of the God as if it was pressed against his back, the God’s breath quick and amazed and aroused on his neck as with Iaon he looked down on himself. 

“There you are,” Iaon said softly, looking down onto the beautiful starlit face below him. It was easing into an expression strangely open as it gazed up at him, a relaxation coming into it that it never knew when its owner was the only one at home behind it. “Can you see it?”

“Is that truly what I look like?” the God said behind him, voice hushed with wonder and ever so slightly troubled. “So strange. That’s not who I see in the mirror…”

“I’m no mirror,” said Iaon, as he shifted forward a little on his knees. The strange sense of having the God both beneath him and seemingly behind him was fueling the heat glowing low in him. He began to move more quickly into the God now, the thrusts deeper, the urgency beginning to build sweet and heavy down deep in his loins. Through that growing heat Iaon looked down and regarded his love laid out before him, reaching up to hold him—the pale and angular body, so strangely elegant, the soft dark wayward hair, the handsomely sculpted face, the long graceful clever hands. All of these were matters for wonder at any time, and far more so when laid bare like this, when the God who owned them was filled with hunger and holding him close, when Iaon was buried in him deep. 

“But do you see?” Iaon said to the one who pressed close to him from behind, soft breath coming faster on his neck as he looked through Iaon’s eyes, through his heart. For what Iaon also saw before him was far more than the body—let that hold him as tightly as it might in enfolding arms and clenching thighs, let the beautiful voice moan his name as if it was the only word worth saying. The mind, that incomparable mind and the passion that dwelt in it, the absolute commitment to the Work, to the thing he was born to do: those Iaon saw here now too. The sudden flares of mischief or of mordant humor, the boundless restless energy, the fierce concentration that laid open to the core everything it was turned upon, including Iaon when necessary; the unbendable, inexorable will that treated the beautiful body as nothing special, just a tool like any other, to be used, and used _up_ if necessary, in pursuit of what was true,even at the cost of his own safety or wellbeing—to the eye of Iaon’s mind all these burned through the pale skin and behind the silvery-dark eyes like flame through the milky glass of a lamp. 

And behind Iaon, within him, through him, Iaon knew the God was seeing the burning and all these other things as Iaon saw them. He was feeling what Iaon felt about them, beyond the possibility of any deception or prevarication or even softening of the truth. Through the growing rapture Iaon could feel how this perception took the God by surprise, truth being something he was so used to having to delve for, something almost always hidden, sometimes beyond finding. Yet here it was, offered to him freely— 

The presence of new warmth from behind him made Iaon gasp for breath as the pleasure built higher, hotter in him: arms wrapping tightly around him, the face buried against the back of his neck, and the heartrending sensation of the God’s eyes wet against Iaon’s skin. But there was no pain, no sorrow there. “I see,” the God said. “And, oh, I _observe.”_ Astonishment was in his voice, and swiftly growing joy: but no disbelief. “My Iaon…”

“Yes,” Iaon said. “Yours.” They were chest to chest now, Iaon’s face against the God’s neck, bodies sliding on a thin new sheen of sweat as they clung together, arms wrapped tightly around each other now, in Iaon’s case seemingly from two sides at once. Ever more quickly, ever more urgently the mortal and the God moved together, sharing the hunger, the ardour, and at long last the absolute certainty. Iaon could feel the heat and heaviness massing low in him, his vision starting to go tight and shadowy at the edges in ways that had nothing to do with the darkness of the Chamber. _But you first,_ he kept thinking, wanting so much to see how it was for the God as this particular wish came true. _This time,_ y _ou first—_

The God was gasping beneath him, head thrown back again, eyes squeezed shut. “Iaon. Can you—oh, can you _feel_ me—”

“You’re all I _can_ feel,” Iaon panted. It wasn’t just the hot sweet heat of being buried in his beloved, of the God clenched tight around Iaon and tighter by the moment as he drew near his climax. There was also the splendid hardness of the God’s manhood caught between the slide of their bellies, their joint movement stroking it seemingly harder every second, the God snapping his hips up into every thrust now, his face strained, transported. “Iaon—!”

 _Very close. Very close now._ Iaon’s balls were tightening in, the happy hot weight in his groin swelling heavier moment by moment, about to pulse. _Oh so close. But you first. You first._ “My God,” he said as they sped up together, both of them shaking all over with effort. “Let me see you. Let me have you.”

“Yes. Almost. Oh, _almost_. I want—Iaon, _please—!”_

“Yes. _Yes.”_ It was about to happen, _about_ to happen, _but not yet, just a moment more_ — Iaon gasped for breath and fought past the tremors building in every muscle, pushing upward just enough to see, picking up the pace; thrusting heartbeat-quick now, feeling the God’s pulse through their connection and everywhere else they touched, matching it. Under him the God gasped, gasped again. “My heart—”

“Is where it ought to be,” Iaon whispered. “Where it always will be.” _Thrust. Thrust. Thrust. Here it is, here it_ is, _it won’t wait—_ “Oh, my God. My own God. My very own. Come for me now. Come for me. _Come—!”_

It was both command and entreaty, desperate with delight and hunger and edged with the knowledge of exhaustion and ecstatic collapse just a breath away. And in obedience to it the God cried out a deep strangled cry, half surrender, half triumph, and went arched and rigid in Iaon’s arms, all of him spasming, his depths clenching hard and tight around Iaon’s manhood, squeezing down with merciless sweetness onto his next stroke. That sudden tightening around him pushed Iaon right to the brink. The feeling of the God’s release spreading and sliding quick and warm between them did the rest. Unbearable pleasure, hunger both aroused and satisfied, rushed outward through Iaon as his vision went dark- and light-shot both at once. He fell forward, shouting in an agony of satisfaction as his essence leapt from him and filled the God deep, as his own pulses shook him, shook him, shook him again and then finally ebbed and left Iaon lying there, gasping, shaking, his heartbeat and the God’s hammering together. 

The two heartbeats started to slow, after a while. For some while they were all Iaon could feel, and the thought started him laughing weakly. _You’re all I_ can _feel…_ A moment later he felt the touch of a hand on his face, from in front, and realized that somewhere along the line he and the God had fallen back across the respective sides of the threshold that lay between them. 

“What you did there,” the God whispered, and had to stop, for he was still working for air. His voice was rough with exertion and exultation around the edges, but gentle at the core. “Iaon, what you did for me…”

Iaon shook his head, eyes closed. “I needed you to be sure,” he said. “I needed you to _know.”_ And to his own astonishment, Iaon felt himself blushing: he buried his face in the God’s chest. “I remember somebody saying, ’There’s nothing like firsthand evidence…’” 

The God shook his head and laughed as Iaon had, helplessly, as he stroked a hand through Iaon’s hair. “Oh, my Prince. If ever I doubted…” He shook his head, laughed again; but the laughter had been strung on something deeper, a potential uncertainty now snapped like a string from the God’s bowed lyre. “No more of that. Not _ever.”_

“Good, then,” Iaon murmured, once again moved until his eyes stung: “that’s good.” And he rubbed his face against the God’s chest as he slipped softly out of him, letting out a long sigh of fulfillment, closing his eyes. 

Iaon had no power to move for a long while, though his pulse slowed at last, though his breath finally found its way back to some kind of quietness in his chest. At first he thought he might be dreaming when he felt gentle hands stroking over him again, down between them. After a few breaths his drowsy mind managed to make its way to the thought _What a mess there must be, help him tidy up…_ But the voice by his ear, dark as the shadows around them, said, “No, Iaon. No need. Lie easy.” Lost in lassitude, entirely willing, he did. Eventually he realized a hand had been stroking through his hair; now it pressed Iaon’s head against the warm chest where it lay. The strong, steady beat there lulled him as another arm slid around his waist and held him close. “Sleep, my Prince,” the murmuring voice breathed into his hair. “…My heart. Sleep.”

Iaon sighed, and slept. 

***

Consciousness: sudden. Eyes open in the dark, looking up into the starlight. _It’s later,_ said something in the back of Iaon’s head: _much later_. _Evening, sometime._ Over recent days he’d been developing some certainty about what time it was in the outer world, despite the way minutes or hours seemed sometimes to stretch or shrink in here. 

“A while after sunset, indeed. I’ve been waiting for you, my Prince,” said the God’s voice from up behind him on the couch: lazy, and with just a touch of mischief in it. 

Iaon turned his head and looked up to see him lying there, draped in his long nightwear-robe of darkness and leaning back against the cushions piled along the couch’s upslope, hands pressed together under his chin in the usual meditative pose. The God’s eyes, at least partly pale again after seeming to have spent so much time gone completely dark with arousal, were resting on Iaon with a look of amusement that was indeed well over into mischievous. Seeing that expression gave the Prince a little shiver of excitement, for such looks routinely meant trouble for somebody. _And so often the somebody is me._

“How long was I asleep?” Iaon said, rolling over toward the God, leaning on one elbow. 

“Five and a half hours,” the God said. 

“How long did _you_ sleep?”

A slow smile. “Four and a half.”

For the God, when not in the direct aftermath of a case, such a duration was significant. “Wore you out, did I,” Iaon said, stretched, and pushed himself up to lean beside the God. Some echo of his earlier exertions lingered as brief fine-muscle tremor: his hams and his lower back were going to have words with him later, but right now Iaon didn’t much care. 

The God raised an eyebrow, turning toward the couchside table near him. “Hungry?” 

Iaon quirked half a smile at him. “Starving. But who was it told me the other day that not answering a question is in itself an answer?”

The God emitted a long exasperated sigh as he turned back. “Prince. These are Mrs. Hudson’s own homemade pitas, stuffed with minted smoked lamb; they materialized in the flat not long ago. I’m unclear what obscure deductive process brought her to the conclusion that some event was in progress after which strengthening might be required; yet here these are. And apparently in honour of your exploits—” 

Iaon waggled his eyebrows. The God rolled his eyes. _“—at Chios,_ the Chamber has provided us with an amphoriska of ‘14 northwest-slope Chian, Ariousios in fact—” 

“Nice. Anything ‘strengthening’ in that wine, perchance?”

The God rolled his eyes. “I deduce that many more months of teasing on this subject lie ahead…”

“You deduce correctly, my God. Nothing in that water, then.” 

The God emitted a great exasperated sigh. “And risk detection? Ineffective execution would be a waste of everyone’s time.” He reached back to the table and handed the Prince one of the glass goblets there. Iaon took it and greedily drank down the water in it. 

“Good,” the God murmured.

“Good?” Iaon’s eyes had been half shut as he drank, but he’d seen the God watching the long smooth pull of his throat muscles as he drank. “That I’m drinking water?”

“My physician keeps telling me how important hydration is.”

Iaon laughed, handed him the goblet back. “Oh, you’re _listening_ to your physician now? This is new.”

“As I said… some of your ideas have merit.” In the dimness, those eyes, lazy-lidded, dwelt smiling on him. Yet even their amorousness still had a bright glint of danger about it. _What is he thinking?_ And then Iaon was tempted to laugh at himself. _Yet here I still am. I’m the moth to his flame. Good thing I’ve grown asbestos wings._

The God poured them both wine, handed Iaon his goblet again: they touched them together, drank. “How many of those did she leave us?” Iaon said, looking past the God to the pita breads. 

“Five.” The God looked briefly perplexed. “I admit, the portion control doesn’t seem to make much sense. Perhaps she ran out of fresh pita.”

The Prince simply smiled, considering that it made perfect sense if the sender expected them to enjoy fighting over the odd pita out. In the meantime, he took the one the God offered him, and ate. 

Sure enough, two pitas each later the fight broke out. But as might have been expected, in this place where nothing ever went in any ordinary way, the squabble went all awry: the God insisting that Iaon should have the last one, and Iaon insisting that the God should eat it, and the God, turning contrary, flatly refusing. 

“Oh, _well_ then,” Iaon said, and pulled a fingerful of the lovely smoked lamb out of that last pita, and very, very slowly began to eat it… but in a way that was most suggestive of other things he might be persuaded to do with his mouth. This gave him the satisfaction of watching the God’s eyes go quite wide and dark again… while for his own part Iaon, with some bemusement, realized after a minute or so of this performance that his own nether regions were beginning to betray increasing amounts of interest in the God’s attention. In fact, Iaon was a little surprised by how quickly this became an issue, for after such an afternoon as they’d had, it typically took him a little longer than usual to come up to speed. In _fact…_

 _No. Oh, surely not. Not really. He_ wouldn’t _have._

 _In the_ water? _But he said—_

Then Iaon considered, as he’d learned to do over time, exactly what the God had said, and (just as importantly) had _not_ said. He opened his mouth to start discussing the issue…

And then closed it again, and slowly, slowly smiled. _So what?_ Iaon thought. _Whether he’s dosed the water or not, this is an adventure. As everything else has been with him: every day together, and every night. Agony or ecstasy, cold wet nights with rats or warm wet ones in his shadows… I’m never bored. …So let’s just see how matters unfold._

The God was leaning closer and closer, his breath tickling against Iaon’s ear, his chin resting on Iaon’s shoulder. “My Prince,” he said, his voice going low and wicked, “are you sure you can’t spare some of that for me? I might still be hungry after all.”

The Prince concentrated on finishing that mouthful with the maximum possible amount of tonguing and soft sucking-clean of his fingers (while reflecting that if his mother had ever seen him eating this way, she’d have boxed his ears for daring to display such abysmal table manners). “Oh, you’re interested now? Ah well. Doubtless I’ll spare you something… eventually…”

The God actually growled at him. “I might just take it from you,” he said, hitching himself over even closer to Iaon’s side. 

“You might just try,” Iaon said, reaching past the God to take possession of another morsel of lamb. He half expected the God to make a grab for it in passing, but he did not… just watched the succulent bit of meat as Iaon slipped it into his mouth, tasted it—it was so tender it hardly needed more than a press of tongue against palate to release the juices, the flavour—swallowed it, and began very slowly licking his fingers again. 

“So I might,” said the God, soft-breathed, in his ear. “But… would you just _let_ me take it, do you think? Or more: would you let me just… take _you?”_

There was something odd about the tone of voice that for a few moments made the Prince wonder what he was hearing… until suddenly he understood it. The slightly dangerous heavy-lidded look the God had been wearing earlier was waiting in the wings, having gone by the bye while they were eating. _And now he wants to bring it back. But he’s asking my consent. Because I was right: now he immediately wants to return the favour… to be with me as I’ve just been with him._ And here at last Iaon stood with the God on the very threshold of the act that had been tantalizing and unnerving him for days, weeks even. 

Iaon swallowed, recalling his earlier thought of how lightly the God had been wearing his power with him. Here, though, he was hearing the sound of a God who after much forbearance, much restraint exercised over his power, was asking for permission to flex his muscles a bit. And Iaon’s hair stood up on the back of his neck at the realization: for it was _delicious_ , what he was feeling—this sense of holding power over someone far more powerful than he, and of then standing on the cusp of relinquishing it without knowing for sure what would happen. That the one in question was his God, and his love, merely intensified the reaction. The danger, and the delight in it, bounced back and forth in Iaon’s mind like lamplight between mirrors, strengthening and sharpening one another. _In no way that even_ slightly _matters would he harm me._ Yet there was still no knowing exactly what he would do… _could_ do. 

Iaon shivered, realizing that in the moments since the God’s question he’d become significantly harder. 

The voice that now spoke in his ear was just a touch rough around the edges. “Quite a long thought, my Iaon...”

“With quite a short result. Yes.”

He saw the God’s eyes widen even more. “I would let you,” said Iaon. “And I do. Take—” He was going to say “Take what I have to give”, and then thought _No, this is about_ him _having the power, don’t start out by holding it back!_ “Take me.”

In the dimness Iaon could see the God swallow, just once, the muscles in that long beautiful throat working. And then, very slowly, the God reached over and took the Prince’s hand in his. For a few moments he simply looked at it, his eyes hooded: turned it to look at the palm; then slowly turned it again, brought the back of it up to his lips…kissed it. 

And Iaon’s whole world whited out in bliss.

He had no idea how long the exquisite pleasure had its way with him. It was hard to even work out how to describe it to himself. If the sea was fire, if that fire could burn you without pain, it was like being knocked over by a wave of that sea, rolled under it and tumbled, helpless, every nerve alight with a stroking, devouring delight more intense than orgasm, and one that did not grow less with passing moments but more, every second _more._ The sensation wasalmost intense enough to wipe out conscious thought completely, but not quite. Iaon was just aware enough of himself to know that he desperately wanted the pleasure to have a little mercy, back down a little, even stop, yet at the same time he also wanted it never, _ever_ to stop— 

—at which point he realized that the grip of the unbearable pleasure had released him, and someone was gently but urgently patting his face. “Iaon? _Iaon!”_

Iaon gasped in a breath and managed to open his eyes. He had to blink a little to get them working. The God was half-supporting him, one arm wrapped around him, and gazing down at Iaon with great concern. “Sorry,” the God said. “Calibrating. Bit not good?”

Iaon stared at him, gasping again, and broke into weak and helpless laughter. “What? Oh, dear God, too _much_ good, _far_ too much—” He gasped for more air. “What _was_ that?!”

“A short cut,” the God said. “I spoke to your nerves directly. Not optimal? Or perhaps we should simply use that as an upper limit?” That look of dark mischief was filling the God’s eyes again. 

“Seems wise.” Iaon shook his head in shaky amusement. He could still feel the hot breath of that pleasure tingling all over his skin, as if he’d been standing in front of some kind of furnace. “What I felt there…” Iaon shook his head. In that ocean of unrelenting and seemingly endless physical sensation, there was nothing a mortal could do but drown. For the moment Iaon preferred something less final. “It might work for a god. But for a mortal… it can’t all just happen at once. There’s more of… I don’t know… an _arc_ to passion. You start small. Get your partner to tell you what they want. Lay the groundwork in affection, in little things, small touches, lesser arousals. Work your way up through more intense sensation. Then approach the big one. Back off a few times, just before hitting it, if you want to prolong things. But finally a big ending that leaves everyone wiped out in fairly quick succession.”

During this the God had gently tugged Iaon into the center of the couch and had leaned him up against its curve; now he was stroking his chest, playing with the rough fair hair. “You’re saying it’s a story.”

“Maybe so.” Iaon thought about that. “That’s one way a poet builds a play, or an epic. Maybe that’s why drama works. Or the other way around. Because it’s how our bodies want their stories told…” He trailed off while he recovered himself a little more. “How did you do that? ‘Speak to my nerves?’”

The God smiled slowly in the dark. “My Prince… you move your body through a world of light every day, like a fish through water, and never think twice about it. But inside your body, except for a few places where light enters through the gates of the senses, there’s nothing but shadow and darkness. Those are mine to command with a touch, if I choose to put forth my power. _And_ if…” 

The hand on Iaon’s chest paused, pressed warm over his heart in the darkness: waiting. Once more Iaon felt that thrill of danger and pleasure all tangled together, even more intense than before. He swallowed, and after a second reached out to the God and took his head between his hands, _One last threshold,_ he thought. “My God,” Iaon said, his voice gone a bit rough, “I didn’t say ‘Take only the outside bits of me.’ It’s inside me I’ve waited to welcome you: in darkness _or_ light. What power you have over my darknesses… Use it.”

The sound of an intaken breath, almost a gasp, of delight; of relief; of hunger. And then the bowed head, and the slow smile. “Let it be as you say,” said the God.

And the God began stroking gently down Iaon’s shoulders. A feeling of unaccountable sweet warmth ran down the touch. Iaon let his head fall back against the couch, breathing out, savoring it. “Ohh. What are you doing?”

“Beginning the story, my Prince,” the God said. “As it will end. In shadow.”

He rose to his knees, straddling Iaon, looming over him, slowly bending closer as his hands moved. “Now,” he said, soft, the voice rumbling deep, _“now_ the taking begins.”

The Prince got that delicious shiver down his spine again as he felt the edges of his world start to go warm and dark, as if something gentle, irresistible, was pressing in on his mind’s borders from outside. Slowly, softly, the God began running his hands over Iaon’s body; and where they passed, that warmth sank muscle-deep, bone-deep, relaxing everything, yet also arousing. The sensation was the exact opposite of the wracking bliss that had imposed itself on Iaon’s body and mind with the God’s kiss on his hand. 

“This is… what you did with the guards in Tiryns,” Iaon said after a moment. The words came slowly. It was hard to speak in the face of this sweetly lulling sensation. It was like being kissed everywhere at once.

“Something like,” murmured the God. “But by comparison that was quick and rough. I wasn’t concerned about them liking it. Whereas, my Iaon… it being what _you_ like that’s at issue here…”

And indeed there something else behind the dark warmth the God was spreading through his flesh: a hint of something deeper, something wilder, that would grow—something slow, lazy, sensual, inevitable. Iaon shivered; it was delightful, if a touch unnerving. 

“And no way for you to resist it, my Prince,” the God’s voice purred by his ear as his hands passed down Iaon’s flanks, slowed, slid inward. “Would you even try, I wonder? Doubtful. Just look at you, when I’ve barely begun. And I have only to touch you for your body to tell me what you want. As here… or here…” 

Iaon’s back arched, the breath sucking into him as the fingertips brushed him teasingly in places that normally would not have been particularly erotic, and suddenly were surprisingly so. 

“So now we tell the tale,” that dark voice said. “Once upon a time… there was a Prince.”

The hands slid up his body again to cradle Iaon’s face on either side just under the jaw, the fingers curling gently against the pulse points there. “He was strong and well-made, this prince, a healer of many skills and a warrior of renown. A mirror of all virtues, clever and thoughtful, wise and patient; a gentle man and a brave one. And as if all these were not enough, the Prince was also one of the handsomest of the sons of men.”

Iaon smiled. “My God… exaggerating a little perhaps?”

“Who’s telling this story, Iaon?” A wicked smile in the growing darkness. “Don’t break my stride.” Those warm hands slid up again on either side of the Prince’s chest, fingers gently stroking the nipples; eagerly they peaked, begging for the touch of lips or the nip of teeth. And these they got, so that Iaon’s back arched again and his breath hissed in and his head rolled from side to side with the pleasure of it, while in the rest of his body that dark warmth spread and grew, stroking against his nerves and waiting its time. 

“Wise dark eyes like the sea in its moods, had the Prince, and hair the colour of the earliest ashen dawn when it’s just leaning from silver toward gold.” The deep soft voice whispered low by Iaon’s ear as fingers stroked through the hair, ran along the shell of his ear, stroked the lobe. “Yet for all this beauty he had no idea of how others saw him; so that he walked through his days and did his work and never knew what eyes watched him, or what lips sighed.”

—and the sigh stirred soft against his ear, the warm breath moving down just a little to the pulse point, breathing hot there: so that under the skin the blood leaped, eager, and the pulse sped faster to feel the lips hovering over it. “…But then one happened upon the Prince who was not like others—one who saw with clearer eyes. And it was only right that it should be a God who could see what mortals or even other Gods could not: a dark God, who chanced upon the Prince that day, and found him very fair.”

Iaon would have smiled again at this, but something serious lay at the core of the warmth that was distilling itself through his body from the God’s touch; something that said _I abolish your disbelief; nothing said here is untrue; be silent, listen, learn what is real…_ And more and more Iaon relaxed into that warmth that kept brushing along his nerves with the dark promise of something much deeper, much wilder. Willingly he let that darkness stroke against the innermost fastnesses of him, eager to feel it make him yearn and shiver… 

“And the God resolved to win that Prince’s favour,” that voice said in his ear, like the night speaking. “For he knew by his art that this mortal was unique among all men. This man could be his one friend, his staunch ally, his boon companion, the only being in Heaven or Earth or the Realms Below who might ever come to truly understand him.” The affection in that voice spread warm inside Iaon’s chest. “And this being so, the God swore that despite any decree of any Power above or below, he would have that Prince for his own.”

Iaon breathed slow, his eyes closed, the lips that brushed and the hands that touched setting a slow warm rhythm in his blood that he didn’t want to resist. With that slow persistent arousing touch a strange change was creeping over his vision, as if he could see with his eyes closed. In that strange new lidded sight the God’s shadowy power manifested itself as dazzling soft swirls of dark fire that spread from his touch through Iaon’s body like ink in water. In that vision the God burned incandescent, no darkness but a naked silhouette of ardent light that bent over Iaon, hands and lips stroking, dark hot pleasure following in their wake, blooming and burning and fading under his skin to bloom again. 

“The God tested the handsome Prince to find if the tales about him were true, of his courage and cleverness,” the God murmured. “And everywhere he was tested, he rang true. He proved a brave man, and a resourceful one: but his strengths did not make him cruel. The helpless had nothing to fear from him, and where honour and hunger strove in him, honour won…though he did not despise his hunger, but mastered it.” 

The tone of approval would normally have tempted Iaon to open his eyes and try to see something of the God’s expression. But he refrained, fearing the vision he saw now might change to something less extraordinary. And the twin darknesses in the face of that blazing shadow rested on him now, and deduced what he was thinking, and smiled, secretive, willing to share the secret with him, in fact insistent on it. _Mortal vision can mislead,_ said something inside him, deep in the darkness, while the hands moved and stroked their sweet and shadowy power into him. _Look with your heart, my Iaon, not with your eyes._ And he obeyed the command, for right now there was nothing he wanted more to do in the world: whatever that voice said, he would say _yes_ to it…

“So at last the God rapt the mortal man away into his own secret place,” that dark voice said, “and began to teach the Prince his methods. He wooed him with cases and the thrill of the chase; he tempted him with danger and mystery, for the Prince loved those and had missed them since he’d been forced to leave the life of adventure he’d once lived. And in return the Prince showed the God the ways of the warrior, but also those of the true friend, which were his great mastery; as were the ways and means of the body’s love. And slowly the God came to desire not just the Prince’s mind, which was both kind and fierce, but his body too, all marked with honourable scars and the signs of his bravery…”

—and it was impossible, impossible and wonderful—as the God set his mouth to the Prince’s scarred shoulder—that anything could feel so beautiful as what was happening now. It was as if, instead of the memory of blood and anguish, a flower of unseen fire like courage made manifest stirred under the scar there, putting to rout even the memory of any pain. The touch of those lips made it as if the old healed wound was as rightly an object of passion as any the Prince had been born with, a beautiful thing, and he moaned with the indescribable feeling of being so cherished— 

“The dark God loved that part of him as much as any other. It was the key to the door that had let the God into his life; it was a blessed thing, a miracle.” Gentle fingers stroked it as the lips moved downward, lingering over the nipple below, then moving past it. “And there were other miracles that deserved as much attention…”

Iaon moaned softly, aware as mouth and hands moved lower that he was being played, played like an instrument, like the God’s bowed lyre. _Or not exactly like that. Like a new instrument in which he’s not yet expert._ Though there had been a lot of free-form experimentation in their earlier lovemaking, none of their previous times together had partaken of quite this air of intense concentration on Iaon. _Different now, though._ It was as if after Iaon had been inside the God, something had been completed for him, some longstanding question finally answered, or answered fully. _As if, perhaps, having himself been the instrument, he now knows how to bring the best out of it…_

“Yet for all his longing the God dared not reach out to touch the mortal’s perfections until the Prince gave him leave. Patiently he waited, burning dark in his own fire, until the Prince slowly felt the heat of it too. Slowly he moved closer to warm himself at it: and at last, being the hero he was, he reached straight through the flames and touched the God himself, and drew him close.” 

Just there, there only, the power of the voice was shaken, the ardency of it suddenly going almost shy. It was an echo of the terrible gentleness of the feelings sweeping through Iaon now—calibrated, as the God had said, and far more perfectly tailored to what Iaon would read as pleasure; distantly akin to that awful overwhelming bliss, but far subtler, darker, more nuanced. 

“And so at last the God, being taught by the beautiful mortal to know that he was loved…” The inexpressible tenderness in the deep voice murmuring in his ear drew shivers up Iaon’s spine without any touch of his God’s hand being needed. “—and being schooled by him in the arts of the body’s delights…”

A stroke of both hands down to either side of Iaon’s phallus now. It hardened, it throbbed dark, it roused and roused again, silently begging those hands to touch it. Close to him, against the dark-burning blaze of the God’s silhouette, he saw the shape of his beautiful manhood, even brighter; hard, erect, twitching for want of him. Iaon reached out to touch it, stroked it, the silk of it, the eager warmth inside the fire— 

It pulsed in his hand as the God lowered his head to look into Iaon’s eyes, and the breath of his murmur washed soft across his face. “…at last the God moved to make his most secret oath come true. For he had sworn to know the depths of his Prince’s body so fully as no mortal and no other God ever would or could. He would fill him so wholly with his ardour and his power that his Prince would never after want any other within him but the God who was his to command.” 

“Oh yes,” Iaon whispered. _“Yes.”_ The hunger, the empty aching _yearning_ inside him to be pierced, to be warmed by that core of light and the fierce dark heart behind it: it was wonderful, unbearable, he never wanted it to stop but he wanted it to stop _right now…_ “Please!”

“And so the God prepared at last to embrace his handsome Prince…”

“Ah. This would…” Iaon’s eyes rolled up in his head for a moment as the God’s hand stroked gently over his manhood, head to root to head again, and lifted away after to make the next contact that much more delicious. “Nnngh. Would possibly be a point to remind the eponymous God… that what follows requires a certain amount of, ah, preparation…” 

That beautiful, dark, knowing chuckle again as the God repeated the stroke, and Iaon writhed with the pleasure of it and the still-growing hunger it left in its wake. “Ah, but it lay within the God’s gift not only to draw his own shadows about mortal flesh, but to remind that flesh of the pleasures it takes in its own darknesses without aid. Of the times when it drowses, goes slow, lets all tensions go. As by the fire, in a comfortable chair, eyes drifting closed, everything going warm and easy as one slides into sleep…” And Iaon felt the hand, soft-gloved in shadow, reach down, touch him, stroke gently at the entrance to desire. Which, so sweetly importuned, simply sighed a silent sigh of pleasure and laid itself softly open, like a flower opening under some dark sun, welcoming and relaxed…

_“Ohh…!”_

“Yes. And so when the shadow that lay within the beautiful Prince had obeyed its master’s bidding and made the way ready…” 

—and it was as if the darkness within Iaon’s vitals grew warm and full and began to spread gently wide, like a warm breath breathed out and without strain or pain simply filling everything, filling fuller— 

“Oh. My _God….”_

“Yes?”

“That... was _amazing!_ ”

“Yes.” A smile. “Then at last…” That voice dropped so low and dark and soft it seemed to be coming from somewhere inside Iaon rather than anywhere without. “Then the God moved to fulfill his long desire, to fill his Prince with himself to the uttermost: his tongue in the mortal’s honey-sweet mouth…”

…and that was happening, Iaon’s lips parting more than willingly to receive it, to feel its slow deep stroke against his own as his God laid his body down upon him, weighty, warm, arms enfolding him, holding him close, pulling him closer— 

“… and the core of him at last, _at last_ entering his Prince…”

—the longing, the hunger in that voice was astonishing: and how, _how_ was it still speaking in his ear while the God’s tongue was softly stroking his, _who knows, who cares, just one more miracle—_ as the beautiful blunt hard heat kissed up against Iaon, softly pressed inward, entered in…

Iaon moaned with delight, feeling his divine lover in ways that should not have been possible; godhead inside him, _power_ pressing into him, hungry, ready, irresistible, but restraining itself— “But slowly, so slowly: slipping in only just past the gateway at first, learning the shape and pressure of his Prince’s welcome little by little—”

—the warmth, _exquisite,_ the hardness, _oh, so longed-for,_ breaching, filling what has so much wanted to be filled, darkness within somehow gone slick and warm as if liquid, _oh, marvelous,_ and all the little fears proving ridiculous now in the face of this unutterable ecstasy— 

“—and feeling the slow sweet squeeze of the Prince all around: then sinking inward, deeper, deeper still…” 

—this ecstasy of completion: of the other being within him, surrounded by him, indwelling within him and impossibly glad to be there, for (oh, strange and wondrous secret) Immortality, it seems, longs as greatly to dwell within Mortality as the other way around— 

“…until the God was buried inside his dear Prince’s body to the very root.”

—and having now come there, desiring nothing more in all the world than to come there again. Slipping outward, delicious, the slowest and most tactical of retreats, and then entering in again, more assured of the welcome, more quickly now, more fiercely— 

“And so he set about making the Prince his, his _own, his only—”_

“Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, God, _yes—”_

—and again, the withdrawal, the pause, and then the sweet hot ingress, plunging deep— 

—And again. And again. The pace increasing now. Iaon’s depths deepening further, hungry to accommodate more. The perfection of feeling what he’d felt before, the sense of having been made to fit, one for the other, and both of you knowing the ecstasy of fitting at last, the delight of having come from such great distances and impossibly different circumstances to be here in this moment together. _So close. Yes._ Now. _Dear God_ now— 

But the words had gone dark with that wicked humour that had been lurking in the background all this while. “And the Prince thought he might have found his release then: but he did not know that his God could command him back from the precipice with just a touch. Could let the pleasure build higher still, yet not allow it to come to that particular ending. Not for some time yet. For what a God decides to take, and make his own… is as far beyond any mortal’s ability to command to an over-hasty completion as it is for him to withhold.” 

Iaon managed to pull in a few gasps as he lay there simmering in the heat of a body that had thought it was ready to finish out that phase of delight… and then found all he could do was laugh helplessly. “You brat!” he said. “All right, _come on—!”_

And now the story ceased entirely to be told in words and moved into its deeper idiom, becoming wholly a matter of breath and touch, of embrace and caress, as the chapter just past re-enacted itself with different rhythms, new themes added. Again and again the dark laughter or the sweet unsated hunger caught Iaon back from the brink; and again and again the voice spoke the single word into which it poured so much meaning. _Iaon._ Night’s darkness again, whispering just the one word as it had a forever ago in his dreams, unquestionably so soft and deep because it was being heard with the heart rather than the ears. And the shadow was here and so was the fire, though both were in a new configuration Iaon had never dared to dream of, the shadow embracing him, the fire’s heat within, banked and steady though it flickered hot and fierce with every new stroke. 

_Athanatos._ Not just what the poets hopefully called it, but _literally_ immortal, this passion, this inextinguishable flare of dark and penetrating fire. Just hearing his name repeated again and again while the God thrust deep within him inflicted such pangs of sweetness on Iaon as would in other lovemaking have overthrown him on the instant. But here he was prevented, here he was strengthened, here the rapture grew from moment to moment as they moved together, so that Iaon felt again and again the kind of pleasure that would have meant lovemaking’s end for a mortal with a mortal partner. But again and again he moved through it and past it, joined with his lover, to the next challenge, the next level. It was the gift he had given the God, mirrored back to him, increased as many mirrors will increase a single light. And the power that made this possible kept rising between them, more complex now than the God’s unmingled darkness, even as Iaon was more than he had been before that ever-deepening shadowy presence entered him; something far greater than anything merely physical now, plumbing his depths and opening them out, opening _him_ out, deeper and deeper— 

As another level, another height or depth of being, opened between them, around them. Staggering pleasure, nigh-unbearable joy. The God’s arms around him, burning without pain, inescapable, as if Iaon would ever have sought escape. “ _Mine,”_ the God said from the depths of him. _“My Iaon.”_ It was a commandment, it was ordained, and Iaon welcomed it, drank the fire of it like wine. _We can never be apart after this,_ he thought in a joy so deep and fierce that it scored his soul like anguish. _Never. We could be across the world from one another and still be together. He could be in the heights of Heaven and I could be in the depths of Hell and still we would be together—_

And another level higher still. Blinded by dark fire, Iaon rode with the other, _inside_ the other, seated in the heart of his power. He was hardly even sure he had a body any more: he could feel nothing but the pleasure, the God’s never-assuageable hunger for him, his love for him, his unwillingness ever to let him go— _Yes. Yours. As you are mine._ And he heard the assent, felt the flare of complete delight. _Both of us. Each other’s._ Forever— 

And now one more level yet, a whole sky ablaze with the God’s darkness, a shadowy empyrean, blinding. There were bodies again, but these were of the same dark flame; nothing else could bear this furious power, this savage untempered delight. Heartbeats pounding, different rhythms at first, then matching, drawing closer, then finally one; one heart, one beat, one God, one man, wound about one another, tangled as flame tangles, penetrating and penetrated and still whole, radiant, the rhythm speeding, they merged, they _burned—_

 _“Iaon—”_ that voice said, the one word by his ear. It was a growl of hunger and eager anticipation, of desperate restraint at last about to give way; it was a warning of a fall from an impossible height that could not be survived alone, only together. 

_“Yes—!”_

_“Now.”_

It was like being the string that’s plucked: how can it do otherwise but sing? —though there was nothing else Iaon wanted more. Somewhere far away, helpless between the hands that held him, the mouth that kissed him, the manhood that filled him soul-deep, Iaon cried out without words, without voice, without sound, as he was shattered by the blast of a pleasure that had no name among mortal men because no mortal could have imagined it. Somewhere far away his body was obeying the word the God had spoken, flooding the glowing space between them with his seed. Somewhere far off the God’s release filled him with more of that dark fire, the God’s body shuddering with joy to fill him so, Iaon’s shaking with delight to receive the gift. Iaon drifted near-unconscious in the flow and eventually the ebb of the pleasure, the God lost in it as well, master of it but also mastered, the two of them clinging together, inextricably entwined…

Very slowly—or it seemed slowly: time in the Chamber, under the circumstances, might have come somewhat undone—the natural order of things reasserted itself as shadow became light again, and light shadow. Slowly Iaon became aware again that he not only had a body but was inside it, and that the God embracing him and still nestled within him had one too. He was somewhat relieved to find that the God looked as completely wrecked as he was sure he did. 

“Well,” Iaon just managed to say. “That would be what I’d call a happy ending…” He fell silent, smiling. 

“So the story was good, my Prince?”

“It was better than good,” Iaon whispered, drawing the dark head to him. “It was true.” And he kissed the God on his lips, and his forehead, and then buried his face in the beautiful dark curls, and simply sighed into them. In that soft darkness, or the Chamber’s, he closed his eyes and lost the knowledge of himself.

Rather later—perhaps he’d slept, perhaps not: he couldn’t tell—Iaon found the God leaning on one elbow again, looking at him in the starlit dimness. The God looked loose-limbed and languid and excruciatingly pleased with himself: in short, divinely shagged out… though somehow completely in control of himself as well, which was simply not fair. 

Iaon blinked and rubbed his eyes, and slowly something came to mind that had been rather driven to the edges of his mind by events. “…There wasn’t actually anything in that water, was there.”

“Hydrogen and oxygen,” said the God, “but no additives.”

Iaon rolled his eyes, filing this statement (along with so many others of the God’s) under _Science No One Else Understands Yet._ “But you were definitely testing _something_.”

“Perhaps I was.”

Iaon groaned, amusement making up a large part of the sound. “Is it possible to get a straight answer out of you at _any_ time whatsoever?”

“Of course it is, my Prince,” the God said, his eyes alight with mischief. “But far be it from me to tell you exactly _when_. Some deductions must be reached without outside assistance.”

And suddenly it all came together. “You were looking to see if I could _fool_ myself into being ‘strengthened,’ said the Prince, his eyes narrowing a little. ”Because I was sure you’d done it.”

“Placebo effect,” said the God, smiling in pleasure that Iaon had found his way through to at least part of the puzzle’s solution. “It can be quite powerful. In some cases it works even when the subject _knows_ it’s being used. Sometimes even second-degree effects such as this can have significant results.” He pushed his hips into Iaon’s and ground into them a little to emphasize which results he meant. “But a chemical’s effects would by definition have had limits. Your faith in my abilities… would seem to have none.”

The touch of shyness that had crept into the God’s voice set the warmth spreading through Iaon’s chest again. “You’re always experimenting, aren’t you,” Iaon said, drawing his God close again and doing a little grinding of his own. “Not just on others. On yourself.”

“And why not? If life itself’s an experiment, as some say, then it behooves us to refine it on the fly as circumstances require.”

“Life is an experiment?” Iaon said, frowning at the new puzzle. “Performed by whom? To what purpose?” 

“Such posh grammar, my Prince.” The God smiled as Iaon batted a lazy fake-punitive hand through his hair. “As for purposes—” After a few moments spent with his nose buried in Iaon’s hair, he shrugged. “Perhaps merely to find out if it works? … But theorizing without data is always an error. I collect the data as I may while doing other more important things.”

“Oh enough of that for Heaven’s sake,” Iaon murmured. “But tell me something?”

“Anything.”

Iaon chuckled. “Don’t make any promises you won’t keep. Just— It’s not _always_ going to be like that when you fuck me, is it?”

The God looked faintly stunned. “I… have no idea.”

“Truly a first,” the Prince said. “We’ll find out later.” And he pulled the God’s head down to rest against his shoulder, kissed him again, and went to sleep.

***

Not even the God had been in any condition to get right up and go about his normal routine after such an evening. It was well after dawn when the Prince awakened again to find the God gazing dozily over at him, hair heading in every possible direction on the cushion beneath his head. 

“Why are you even awake?”

“Because you are.”

“Clot,” Iaon said tenderly. “I love you. Go back to sleep.”

The God’s eyes immediately fell closed, and his mouth fell open, and that adorable tiny snore was coming out of his face almost before Iaon had finished speaking. 

Iaon stroked a few curls away from the closed eyes, then got up, grabbed his robe, and went off to the bathroom for his normal morning ablutions. He was weary and a little achy in the muscles, but otherwise was astonished to feel so little negative aftereffect from could at the very least have been considered a truly cosmic shag. Much of what had happened was completely beyond his understanding… but perhaps that would sort itself out over time. _In the meantime, wouldn’t have missed it for the world._

He made his way out into the sitting room, glanced out the windows: took in the sun shining, the Bees humming below. _Just another day in Paradise…_ Then Iaon went in to make tea. 

The Thalastrae, possibly having been alerted by the House of what was going on _—or by the Earth moving, for all I know!_ —were nowhere in evidence: which was fine. The Prince boiled the kettle, fetched the tea leaves down, measured them out and set the pot to steep, then went into the Cupboard That Was Cold for milk. “All right, Heisenberg?”

“All right, Prince. Nice blog, that last one.” 

“Thanks.”

…milk in the cups, honey in them: one big dollop for the God, two smaller ones for Iaon. He poured his own and was about to wander back out into the sitting room when a shadow-veiled shape slouched itself against the rear kitchen door. There was the God, in his blue silk bathrobe and pyjama bottoms, yawning, scrubbing a hand through his hair. 

“Thought you were back asleep.”

“Woke up again,” the God said. “Tea.” It was more a statement than a request.

Iaon poured the God’s mug full, passed it to him. Their fingers touched. And the sensation was strange, not like touching someone else’s fingers: more like touching your own. Except that you didn’t usually feel like you _loved_ your own fingers when you touched them… and that was how this felt. Strange it might have been, but it was also good. _Very_ good. 

The God’s fingers lingered there a moment as they took the mug from Iaon. Iaon looked up into the shadowed face, saw the silvery gaze bent down on him. _Figuring something out, as always…_ Then the God had a sip of his tea; frowned at it. 

“Sweet enough?” Iaon said.

The God held his mug out to Iaon. Iaon took it, blew on the tea, sipped, evaluating. _One honey._ He handed it back to the God, who sipped at it again, nodded. “It is now.”

 _What?_ Iaon thought. 

“Now it tastes of you,” the God said, and wandered into the sitting room, where he flopped down on the sofa, put his feet up on the table, and lolled his head back, eyes closed. 

Iaon’s breath caught softly on the sudden warmth in his chest. After a moment he strolled back into the sitting room too, determined to simply enjoy the gentleness of the God’s mood—because, their lives being what they were, something was likely to happen to that, and them, without warning. 

In the meantime there was the fire in the hearth, and the sunshine, and the bright blue morning, with the occasional high white cloud in it wandering past the windows; and a flicker of light out there, like the beat of some bird’s bright wing catching the sun. Iaon wandered over to the window, idly peered over the lace curtain, and paused where he was. 

“My God…”

“Mmmm?”

“Did we have anything on for this morning?”

“No.”

“Then would you tell me something?”

“Anything, my Iaon.”

 _“…Why,_ exactly, would the front yard be full of goddesses?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Notes and links for chapter 23 are here](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/40092282577/chapter-23-notes-and-links) at the [Lotus Room blog.](fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com)


	24. Of An Afternoon in the Garden and a Sight Seen from Afar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Consulting God steps out in his formals, insults the authorities, and feels the future’s breath on his neck: his warrior-Prince plays the host, meets an old flame, and suffers a pang from the past. 
> 
> _Warnings for interfamilial issues, motherhood in multiples, fried saganaki cheese, nicknames and missing guests, sneaky snakes, erotic poetry in broad daylight, pre-angst angst, and Archetype’s pendulum starting its inevitable swing toward the nadir._

The God sprawled there on the sofa with arms thrown out along its back, head leaned back, eyes closed, and legs stretched out in front of him, somehow managed to go from “we haven’t a worry in the world” to “what fresh Hell is this?” in a breath’s time, without anything changing, not even the timbre of his voice. _Or maybe I’m just getting better at spotting when he’s unnerved,_ Iaon thought. “The front yard’s _full_ of Goddesses?” the God said. “Perhaps we could strive for a touch more precision, my Prince?”

“A fair number of them, anyway.” The formally-robed group Iaon had spotted from the window was foregathered down at the far end of the path leading to the “front gate” pillars of the House of the Two Hundred Twenty-One Bees. They all had about them that shimmer of personal radiance that Iaon was now used to seeing in Mrs. Hudson: but it was far brighter. Iaon started taking a head count. “Three, six, nine, ten—”

 _“Ten,”_ the God said, opening his eyes. Even though they were veiled by his shadow, Iaon could see they were alarmed. “One’s much taller than the others?”

“Yes, now you mention, the one in the middle is easily a head higher and she’s…” _Wearing a helmet. Most goddesses don’t wear helmets. Except for one…_ “My God,” Iaon said, his mouth going a bit dry, “I think your Mummies have dropped by for a little visit.”

The God sat up straight. “Surprised we didn’t see them here a lot sooner, actually,” he said, sounding a bit annoyed. “But then…” 

Iaon looked over his shoulder at the God. “They were waiting for us to…?” … _Get serious._ Seriously _physical. …Divinely speaking. And now that we_ have…

Iaon broke right out in a sweat. 

The God leapt up off the couch with the air of one shifting into “resolute action” mode, and plunged across the sitting room toward the mantelpiece. Though Iaon couldn’t see the God’s face through the normal veiling of shadow, he nonetheless clearly caught from him a brief flash of feeling resonating exactly with one that abruptly dragged itself up out of Iaon’s deep memory—the panic he’d repeatedly felt as a boy when he realized his mother was coming upstairs to see if he’d actually cleaned his room after _saying_ he had. 

“Right,” the God said as he started picking seemingly random items off the mantelpiece, then spinning around to shove them into one of the drawers in the partner-desk between the windows. “Let’s get ourselves sorted, Prince, no point in letting them get the upper hand just by dint of turning up in a great squawking crowd like the Harpies at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Be polite, but don’t fawn. And _no kneeling,_ you’ll put them off, you’re a mortal of royal birth living on Olympus and no one’s going to expect you to start abasing yourself on the doorstep of your own house—”

Sudden amusement arose in Iaon, jostling for primacy against equally-sudden annoyance. He snorted. “Wait, would this be _you_ giving _me_ lessons in comportment?…” 

The God stared into another desk drawer, slammed it shut, caromed back over to Iaon and grabbed him by the shoulders, bending down to examine him in unnerved haste as if he was a piece of overlooked evidence. “But you can’t seem too casual either, they wouldn’t like that, you need to look like you want to impress them, you need to wear something nice—” He pushed Iaon away and whirled back to the mantelpiece, rummaging there. “Hurry up, why are you just standing there, get upstairs and put on clothes! Your second-best khiton, you know the one, that dark blue—”

“You’re _dressing_ me all of a sudden? What, am I _six…?!”_

“It brings out your eyes, Iaon.” Back to the desk, more secreting of things, then back toward the kitchen. “Up you go now, it’s in your wardrobe, hurry _up,_ don’t dawdle. _THALASTRAE!!”_

Iaon would have started laughing if it weren’t for the God’s anxiety. He headed up the stairs at a trot as the voices of what seemed like more of the Thalastrae than he’d ever heard together in one place seemed to be congregating in the sitting room. Their tones of voice seemed to be striking a careful balance between “What’s the problem? Nothing unusual’s happening” and “There, there, don’t fret.” 

“It’s just the Muses—”

“And Tritogeneia—“

“Athena’s unarmed, that’s always good…”

“So hors d’oeuvres for, let’s say, fifteen—” 

“—and wines to match—”

“—we’ll put out some lawn chairs and loungers—” 

“But nine and one makes _ten,”_ Iaon said under his breath as he opened the door to his room: he knew from the sound as he’d come up the stairs that at least one of the ladies was behind him. “Has somebody all of a sudden _actually_ added some Muses?” For this was a common trope among poets. They were always declaring someone “the tenth Muse”, and then the unfortunate nominee would hurriedly go underground in case one or all of the present title-holders took offense. 

“Odds are not everybody’s here yet,” said the voice of the Thalastrae who was (somehow) in the room ahead of him and had already opened his wardrobe. The dark blue linen khiton pulled itself out of there and was shaken once the long way to snap out any wrinkles, then floated across the room and pushed itself into Iaon’s hands. 

“Nobody ever arrives at the same time for something like this,” said another of them, who handed him his better sandals, the long lace-up ones. 

“…ought to be at least a couple more…” A brownware basin of steaming rosemary-scented water with a sponge in it floated past and settled down on the bedside table.

“So the usual rule, expected number plus ten percent over—”

“—or maybe fifteen—”

“And anyway there’s always somebody who got a last minute text they have to deal with, or else they find out something’s not back from the cleaners yet—”

“‘Something like this?’” Iaon said, standing there holding clothes and sandals and feeling just a touch out of his depth. “What ‘this’ _is_ this? Or is there a particular protocol on Olympus for meeting the mortal who’s shagging your son? Please, someone help me out here…!”

“You’ll be fine,” said several of the Thalastrae all together, in an affectionate “Oh don’t be silly!” tone that Iaon much hoped was deserved. “Just don’t let his nerves get to you. And hurry up!”

And the door closed. 

Iaon sighed, got rid of his robe, and took a moment to sponge down with the rosemary water and dry off. Then he pulled on the long cerulean-blue khiton, forced to admit as he glanced at the mirror inside the wardrobe that there really was something in what the God had said about his eyes. _Hmm. Overrobe? Why not? The linen’s light; it won’t be too bad out in the sun, and if it gets hot I can always lose it…_ The overrobe was short-sleeved, in a horizon’s-edge-at-evening indigo: Iaon slipped into it, shrugged it into place, then sat down hurriedly to do up his calf-high sandals. 

Moments later he was heading down the stairs, twitching a little, for all along his nerves he could feel the fine faint undercurrent of the God’s present mood: it was twitching too, swirling, leaping, unable to settle. _Well, just calm down and get a grip,_ Iaon told himself, _because though he’d rather be bludgeoned unconscious than admit it out loud, he needs you right now._ And indeed just inside the front door of 221B, there stood the God, also changed into his more formal clothes—nightshade-purple khiton, night-black overrobe—with his own shadows veiling him close under it all. He was quite still now, all that impetuous motion leashed: waiting. 

Iaon came down beside him, looked up at him. “Ready?” he said. 

The God’s eyes glinted silver in the front-hall shadows as he looked down into Iaon’s. He nodded. 

Iaon smiled up at him. “I’m going to love them,” he said, “because I love you. So let’s go let them know.” And he held out his hand to the God.

The God nodded again, took Iaon’s hand in his, and glanced at the door of the House. It swung inward before them, and Iaon and the God went out to greet their guests. 

***

Later Iaon could remember little of how the two of them strolled down the walk together, as casually as if they’d simply stepped out to see how the roses were doing. He did remember—for the image turned up in various dreams, later on—the flash of ten pairs of eyes suddenly turned toward them; divinely fierce (if unconsciously so), acutely assessing, impossibly powerful. But Iaon had seen the fierceness before; it walked beside him now, tall and dark and proud, its warm hand sweating just the littlest bit in his. The ruthlessly acute assessment, _that_ wasn’t so much to cope with: he dealt with it every business day. And as for the power, it had just now been inside him, and he inside it… and in a way, still was. So Iaon relaxed. He smiled into the eyes turned toward them as visiting royalty smiles: courteously, with just a touch of dignified reserve, but also the kind of warmth and openness one saves for people who’re dear to someone much beloved. 

There were introductions. Of those Iaon remembered absolutely nothing afterwards, because everything immediately became so much more fun. 

To meet the Muses… Iaon had always had more than enough of poet in him to wonder, even in his life before Olympus, what they’d be like up close and personal—the goddesses who among them divided up mastery of every art, the noble and beautiful Nine whose blessing every poet seeks before beginning work; the divine minds without whose presence no art made is made well, and who (after the sweat and the hard work’s handled) ever delight in feasts and the pleasure of song. Iaon’s initial thought had been that he should probably watch his manners and his language around them. But within minutes he discovered that If he’d ever thought they’d be overly sensitive, refined, or standoffish, he’d been seriously mistaken. 

The average mortal, it was true, tended to think of them as all dressed alike and all, as it were, singing from the same page of the hymn book. Iaon wasn’t quite prepared for the reality: all of them differently dressed, and all of them physically very different—from Euterpe’s dark and cool yet also mischievously haughty north African look, to the tall bronze-fair Circassian cast of Klio, to Urania’s pale, pale beauty, with her hair dark as night but starred with shining silver strands here and there: from Melpomene’s high sharp cheekbones and Terpsichore’s quick lithe grace (she was the slenderest of the lot, and the most angular, but somehow still moved with the grace of a reed in the wind) to the perfect tilt of Erato’s marvelously wicked pale green eyes. Yet there was also the beautifully sculpted bow of Thalia’s mouth (which stretched into the most amazing and disarming grin when she started yet another bout of serial joke-telling) and Polyhymnia’s totally unexpected and astonishingly pure baritone (revealed when four of the Nine at one point leaned together and began singing something they referred to as “barbershop”). And then there were the amazing night-chestnut waves of Erato’s hair, so dark a brown it was almost black, and Melpomene’s glossy auburn curls… The Prince could suddenly see why the God’s suspicion that more than just four of the Nine were involved in his heredity seemed well-founded. 

Yet so did his description of them, when together, as a group that hunted in a pack. The Prince had never seen people, related or not, who were so _together_ even when they were separate. They finished each other’s sentences without mercy, and two over on one side of the garden might laugh at something another, up by the house, had found funny. Finally the Prince just put it down to them being all the great Arts in one place—the original sister act, the original Greek chorus—and let it go at that. If they were now to be considered, at one remove, a kind of family, he could do a lot worse.

Pallas Athene was another matter entirely. It took the Prince a few minutes to get past his initial awe—for as one of the great Twelve she carried with her an air of tremendous power much like that he’d first experienced with Hermes—and also to get to grips with the astonishing slender height of her: she was taller even than the God. But then Iaon started seeing other similarities to the Consulting God in her. Her eyes leapt right out at you—a perfect match for the God’s in their silver-grey moods, sharp and tending to flash and snap with passion or annoyance while she talked. And there was the same barely-managed abruptness, the barely-restrained energy, the abruptness and the inability to suffer fools. It was easy to see, now, how his God came by them… and also much easier to believe in the tale of how Athena decked War himself and left him groaning on the floor of the Gods’ throne room, whinging about his nosebleed, while the rest of the Olympians roared with approving laughter. 

The image made Iaon suddenly grin at her, for that same wholehearted scorn for miscreants and bullies was one of the things Iaon most enjoyed about the God. What astonished him was when he got a grin so like one of the God’s immediately flashed back at him. He and the God and the Muses had been discussing his blogging in general, but all of a sudden Athena took Iaon’s elbow and steered him away to start grilling him about the message-distribution logistics he’d spent so long working out with Westie. Iaon got so involved in the details that he didn’t immediately pick up on the implications when she laughed and told him to just call her _Glaukops;_ he simply said “Well, call me Iaon!”, and then he and Greyeyes got back into the minutiae of missive scheduling and working out how to know when an oracle’s priests were most likely to be out of bed. 

After that everything seemed to get unaccountably easier. Everyone was smiling at Iaon. That suited him fine, because all these Goddesses were truly quite beautiful when they smiled, particularly, for some reason, Thalia. _Is that because I’ve spent a lot of time kissing a mouth that feels a lot like that mouth looks? Could be._ But then somewhere between the first and second glasses of wine, Iaon suddenly remembered: _Oh, sweet heavens, they can all get into your head the same way the God could! And they’re probably there_ right now.

At that Iaon began to sweat again. Yet the Goddesses’ smiles all remained genuine when they spoke to him. More to the point, the way they were all _moving_ had loosened up; and not merely by mortal standards, either. (Iaon had long before noticed that immortals didn’t move quite the same way mortals did, and had spent some time in consultation with the God discussing the finer points of godly body language.) _Which either means they find me adorably readable, and they like what they’re seeing: or else they’re so good at hiding what they’re_ really _thinking that there’s no point in me wasting time worrying about it any more. Either way, they’re still our guests, and you’ve had as many guests who thought you were a waste of time as you’ve had ones that liked you, so just_ let it go. _Much more important to make sure everybody’s getting enough food and drink, because your opposite number is right now too busy trying to look all cool with his cheekbones even through his shadows to mind what his Mummies are putting in their mouths._

So this Iaon did. He wandered gently around the garden, occasionally taking a tray of snacks off one of the circulating Thalastrae and shoving it under the visiting deities’ noses: lingering here and there to eavesdrop in genial-host manner on conversations that obviously weren’t private, dropping in a word here or there, and otherwise behaving as if he was presiding over some casual affair back at the Palace. _Pity most of those didn’t go as well as this is going,_ Iaon thought, pausing to have one of the little puff-pastry-cheese-and-calamari things, which were really very good. _Better weather, better food. And seriously good company…_

In the midst of this he glanced over at the God, who was presently standing among several of his Muse-mummies with his whole bearing and stance eloquent of tolerant long-suffering sonhood. His head turned as he felt Iaon’s gaze, and the God shrugged a shrug that contained a whole glossary of private, annoyed amusement. _Yes, I suppose I love them a bit, they’re my Mummies after all, but no, they don’t understand me, their inane chatter drives me up the wall, why am I standing here like this just putting up with it, this is_ all your fault, _so for Heaven’s sake save me Iaon!_ The Prince shrugged back—something way less nuanced, but quite clear in the _What can you do, keep your loinwrap on, I’ll sort something out_ department—and slipped into the House briefly to take care of a couple things. 

Once back outside Iaon went to rescue the God from Euterpe and Erato (or at least to share his suffering), bringing with him another tray split evenly between the little calamari things and the cubes of pressed fried saganaki cheese, which the Muse of Erotic Poesy was seriously hooked on, and which she had earlier begun eating one by one in the wickedest way possible (with Iaon egging her on, and thinking, _oh those eyes, those eyes!_ He regretted nothing). Now Iaon waved the platter under Erato’s nose and gave her a look that was probably far too naughty for a mortal to give a Goddess: but as host to guest, of course much more was permissible. As Erato reached for the first bit of saganaki, Iaon glanced sideways at the God and flicked his eyes away toward the House. _Go._

For a wonder the God went when told, slipping away as demurely as so much violet-and-night-colored smoke and heading up toward another gaggle of his Mummies who were off to one side of the path among the roses. Iaon tempted Erato into doing her trick a couple more times _(those eyes, oh dear me, Goddess are you listening, I don’t care, they’re really quite wonderful eyes)_ and then prepared to hand Euterpe the platter and make his own escape. _Those eyes, I’m ready for another glass of something unmixed because it’s going to be well into the evening before I can get to grips with someone with eyes like that…_

And as Iaon looked over his shoulder in the God’s wake, he saw someone who was not a Goddess, someone in charcoal and white and for once a khiton instead of a work kilt, standing in front of the black door with a golden rod over his shoulder. “Oh my,” Iaon said, “more guests, would you please…?” —and pushed the tray into Euterpe’s hands.

He’d hoped to reach the door first, but there was probably no real chance of that. Even as Iaon was coming level with the God and Polyhymnia and Urania and Melpomene, the God had spotted the new arrival and was already reacting. “Oh, no, what’s _he_ doing here?!” 

“My God, _wait_ , it’s all right—”

Too late. Iaon went after him, but the God was halfway up the walk to the House already, his khiton’s overrobe doing its best to swirl as menacingly as the Shadowcloak (and falling rather short). “What in Hades’ name are _you_ doing here?” he bellowed at the figure on the doorstep.

“Nice to see you too,” Hermes said, entirely genial. 

“Nothing for you to see here, Investigator, can’t a God have a day off for a change?”

“Wasn’t looking for you, you ungrateful pup,” said Hermes genially, as Iaon came along. “Iaon…”

“Dolios,” Iaon said as he reached past Hermes to hand his empty glass to whichever of the Thalastrae was suddenly standing by the doorstep with the tray. He claimed a full one while looking over the tray’s contents. “What’s your pleasure? Lemnian? Chian? Bybline? Even got some Mendaean breathing, though it’s early in the day for that.”

“Wouldn’t say no to some Lemnian. —Lovely colour on that, isn’t it? Nothing but the best ‘round here, that’s plain. Cheers, Iaon, Consultant.”

The God was frowning—an expression the Prince wasn’t sure what to make of, especially when the God turned the frown on _him_. “What is this, some kind of cockeyed undercover operation?” said the God. “Is that why you’re calling him ‘Dolios’?”

“I’m calling him that because it’s his _nickname_ ,” said Iaon, “and he very kindly doesn’t mind me using it.”

The God was taken aback. “It is?” 

“Yes, if you’d ever bothered to find out,” said Hermes, lowering his glass. He sounded wryly amused, though.

The God threw the Investigator a look that, shadows or not, was clearly both confused and annoyed. “So you weren’t sent from… further up the Mount… to scope things out.”

“What? Of course not!” said Hermes. “Purely a social call.” He waved the Herald’s rod at the God to emphasize his point, it being snakeless. Its normal inhabitants were presently signifying their God’s off-duty status by lying stretched out like a couple of lazy lengths of rope on the doorstep, sunning themselves. 

“I texted him,” Iaon said, “when I realized a party had broken out.” The Prince smiled slightly. “I admit, I might possibly have mentioned that we just restocked the wine cellar…” 

“Oh,” said the God, somehow managing to look aggrieved and relieved at the same time: and the Prince found himself wondering what _that_ was about. _Today’s going to need a week’s worth of figuring out,_ Iaon thought, _even for the bits_ after _we got off the couch._ “Fine, then, have a good time,” the God muttered, waving one hand absently, and wheeled to head off down the walk again. 

“Hmm,” Iaon said, looking after him. “Sorry, Dolios, looks like the Goddesses have scored all the seating…” 

“Doorstep’s fine by me,” Hermes said, “long as the Bees’re off duty too.”

Iaon laughed and they sat down together in the sun. “So,” Hermes said, after another slug of the wine. “Think you’ve passed muster?”

“Seems like I’m still breathing, so the prospects look good. Though my guesses might not be worth much. You know this lot better than I do…”

“Don’t know that that’s true,” Hermes said. “I wouldn’t see a lot of them in the line of business. Parties and so forth in the evenings, sure, but they tend not to be terribly interested in my line of work, and as for poetry and the rest of it…” Hermes shrugged. “Not my division.”

Iaon nodded and lifted his glass to have a sip of his wine: then paused. Apparently the Caduceus’s snakes shared their master’s gift for instantly getting where they wanted to go without fuss or wasted effort, as one of them had somehow draped itself across Iaon’s shoulders and now had its head in his wineglass. Caught in the act, it gave Iaon an amused sidelong look and went back to drinking with its little flickery tongue. 

Iaon looked over at Hermes, who simply snickered and had some more of his own wine. “I thought it was supposed to be milk with these guys,” Iaon said. “At least that’s what we always left out for them in the barn.” 

“Seems like they break over occasionally,” Hermes said. “Heaven knows, in this business there’s room for them to pick up bad habits. Don’t ask what they were like for the tenday after they had their first brush with the Gorgon’s head.” He rolled his eyes. 

Iaon smiled, shook his head. “Any more noise out of Elis?”

“Nothing except that the Princess is recovering nicely… no lasting damage.” Hermes had another drink. “They’ve stuffed her kidnapper in the same cage _he_ had her in till you two scared him into running.” 

Iaon shook his head again. “Still kind of amazed he survived.”

“A good shot,” Hermes said. 

“I haven’t mastered the weapon yet,” said Iaon. “And at least part of it was luck. The way I came down…”

“It favours the prepared mind, I’m told,” said Hermes, and gave Iaon a half-smile as dry as one of his own. “Wouldn’t mind seeing the weapon again, another day. Or the God’s plans, if he doesn’t mind.”

“If it’s you asking, I think he could be convinced,” Iaon said. “As long as you make enough of a fuss.”

The two of them glanced up to check on the dark figure down the walk, who was once again having his ear bent by several of the Muses. “You’re a good influence on him, Iaon,” the Messenger said. “And Zeus knows we’ve needed _that._ Maybe as much as he has…” 

The Prince shook his head. “All I do is try to keep everyone around here from wanting to feed him to the nearest God-eating monster,” he said. “And him from doing the same to them just to see what happens.” Iaon laughed softly. “So far it seems to be doing all right. The Work gets done… and that’s what counts.”

“Yes it is,” Hermes said. “Maybe that’s the real miracle of it: that someone found their way to him who actually agrees with him on that.”

“Come on, Dolios,” Iaon said. “What’re the odds that he’d ever let anyone near him who saw it differently?”

“Low,” said Hermes. “But the Fates do peculiar things, and sometimes life is very strange…”

Iaon chuckled at that. “You have no idea.” He gently fished the snake’s head out of his wine glass and handed the glass off to one of the passing Thalastrae. “Speaking of which… let me go check in and make sure things are on an even keel.”

“Or as even as they can be when all your mothers come over to check out your intended at once…”

Iaon grinned and got up. “Like one wouldn’t be enough.” He unwound the snake from around his neck, more or less poured it into the Investigator’s hands, and headed down the walk. 

The God was just turning away from Polyhymnia and Klio as Iaon came, glancing out past the House’s garden toward the higher ground. “You all right?” Iaon said softly. 

“Just fine.” But the slight shiver at the edges of the Prince’s nerves told him differently. The God was looking up at the Mount as if expecting some kind of bad weather.

“Are we missing someone?”

“What? No,” the God said. “No one I’d really have wanted to be here.” He glanced around. “Present company’s quite adequate.” And he paused. “Though now that you mention it, I could see where _one_ other might turn up…” The smile was visible even through the shadow.

“Someone you _would_ want to see, I take it.”

The smile under the shadow went more wicked. “Possibly more you than me, Iaon.”

“What?”

The God turned away, the sense of the dark smile growing under the shadow as he headed down the walk. “How’s the Chian holding up? Urania was wanting some.”

“The ladies just cracked another jug—” But the God was already out of earshot. 

Iaon shook his head, went after him. 

***

The afternoon eased on in the most pleasant kind of way, the calm of it slowly settling down around Iaon’s nerves like some kind of invisible balm. It wasn’t all the wine, or the food, or the fascination of the company. It was an increasing sense of acceptance, as if this was something either he or the God had been awaiting for a long time. _For the sandal to drop,_ Iaon thought at one point when he found himself and the God standing each with an arm around the other’s waist, talking in two different directions at once yet both immersed once more in that strange feeling of having been somehow tailored to one another’s physical and emotional measurements. There was a rightness about it that was such a pleasure to relax into, like Iaon’s chair by the fire: a comfort, a reassuring warmth. To be talking revisionism with the Goddess of History, and to squeeze the God a little around the waist in the middle of it without breaking stride, and to be hugged back as the God lectured Polyhymnia about the incipient decadence of twelve-tone chromatics and never missed a beat: it was utter joy. _Now if we can just finally get sorted out on the whole issue of the legality of mortals on Olympus… then life will truly be perfect._

After a little while Iaon went for another glass of wine, and on the way back paused to have a look at the hive (where the Bees were going about their business as if all this was nothing worthy of attention). A little bit later he was irrationally pleased to find Athena at his elbow again—or rather, her elbow more or less level with the top of his head—and to fall casually into conversation with her once more, this time about military matters: campaigning with the Mycenaeans, the order of battle as practiced in Asia Minor, how to find your way back home from Persia. There was no telling how long Iaon stood there shooting the breeze with the Lady of Battles, getting a crick in his neck and trying to answer intelligently as that shining and incisive intellect pried idly at the edges of his, looking for weak points in an affable kind of way. Iaon had to grin, for this was what most of his evenings at home were like: the God poking around (verbally) at the structure of Iaon’s mind, pulling whole chains of reasoning out of it, exposing the weak points the simplest way—by shattering them—and showing Iaon how to replace them with solid ones. It was never exactly a painless process, but once you got a taste for it, it was hard to pass it up when a new player in the game came along. “Glaukops, look, your glass is empty,” Iaon said. “Sun’s over the yardarm now. Something with a little more heft to it? Back shortly, then.”

He went up to the door of the House—there always seemed to be one of the Thalastrae up there with a tray at the moment—and peered at the one hovering there. “Have we got some of the Mendaean out?” he murmured, for it was the right point in the proceedings to start offering the guests the heavier, deeper wines. 

“That one right there,” Thalastrae said. 

“Oh good,” Iaon said, reaching for it. But he never finished the gesture, for at that point something like pain but far sweeter turned over in the Prince’s chest, _hard,_ and the breath went out of him in a very familiar way, even though the God wasn’t anywhere near him at the time. 

Iaon straightened, turned, looked for the God. There he was, down by the stone pillars at the end of the path through the garden. And there by him was someone to whom, though Iaon had never met her, no introduction could possibly be necessary. She was not one of the very tall goddesses like Athena or Urania, but slight. As Iaon watched she reached up to take her son’s head in her hands, pulling it down and planting a kiss in the middle of his forehead, while he scuffed among his shadows like a slightly embarrassed little boy. 

“Take that glass down to Athena, would you?” he whispered. And then Iaon slowly made his way down the path toward the two by the pillars, not hurrying, because he needed time to take in what he was seeing, and wanted a little leisure to enjoy the astonishing moment. _Chrysêe,_ the poets loved to call her, _golden;_ and so she was in the afternoon sunshine, the hair dark amber-gold and her skin that beautiful warm olive color one sees in the southern Peloponnese or out Lycia way. And her face… her _face._ Iaon swallowed. _Oh, don’t let her turn around just yet. If she turns around right now I’ll have to act like I can look at her without gaping like a kid having his first crush. And I don’t know if I can do that—_

Her beauty—there was simply no word for it, no _number_ of words. It just went straight to the heart. Iaon instantly understood where the God got that particular aspect of his looks, the thing that (even when you could hardly see it for the shadows) made you want to hold his face between your hands. And it was nothing to do with mere physical conformation, the idiosyncratic arrangement of cheekbones and nose and mouth and wonderful eyes. There was something else going on—something that suggested that the heart and the mind behind whatever physical beauty was there might suddenly look out at you through them and somehow, astonishingly, find _you_ wonderful to look at, marvelous to be with. The God’s version of this quality was far more restrained and tight-wound, not readily on offer. But in this Goddess who somehow or other was one of his mothers, this quality was laid out in plain sight and not even slightly hidden: the promise of heart-deep intimacy, present in sheer staggering power and openly accessible to anyone strong enough to bear it. It was hard to breathe in the presence of the promise that, who knew, it might just happen—

Then she turned, following the God’s glance, and looked at Iaon. 

The breath went right out of the Prince, and he had to stop, just stand bloody _still_ for a moment and get some air into his lungs to replace what had just left. _But come on,_ he said to himself, _come on, don’t embarrass everybody, get on down there and act like you have some kind of manners—_

Somehow, he had no idea how, Iaon picked up where he left off and went on heading down that path in the face of the staggering beauty and warmly welcoming smile that was trained on him. _And it’s a good thing this is happening now,_ he thought. _Because any time before the God, I’d simply have fallen at her feet and worshipped her, and begged her to let this poor mortal worship her further in any other way she might be pleased to permit…_

Then Iaon grinned at himself. _Because when would you have ever met Aphrodite herself before now? Just get a grip._ Yes, he was as nervous as if he was going over that hill again at the head of thirty very unwilling men, hanging onto his sword and his honor for dear life. _Yet this is exactly what you felt when you were heading into the kitchen after the God that night. Scared, but you_ had _to do it, because what was waiting on the far side of the fear was worth way more than giving in to it would have been._ The radiant form regarding him from down at the end of the walk was simply the embodiment of what he’d felt that night… and of what had made it possible for him to keep going. 

The dark God and the bright Goddess watched him come. Iaon noted in passing that she was all in amber and russet silk, rather demurely cut and draped; but mostly his attention was on her face and her eyes. He couldn’t help but smile, recognising in her look and expression the single common factor in the eyes of every man and woman he’d ever kissed or amorously touched or laid him down with. His God was watching Iaon closely through his shadow, and Iaon turned that smile on him briefly. But when he was close enough to them both, he turned to Aphrodite and looked the Goddess in the eyes, trembling a bit; then (for regardless of the God’s concerns, it _felt_ right) he went down on one knee and bowed his head to her. _“Athanat_ _ë_ ,” he said— _immortal Goddess,_ _deathless Lady:_ “…you are greatly welcome.” And if the style of address was formal, well, he knew power when he felt it, when it shook him to his bones this way: especially one that had been a driving force in his life for so very long. 

He could feel the Goddess’s thoughtful look, and her smile, on his skin, just as he could always feel the God’s. “Do get up, dear,” she said in a lovely soft low voice— _there’s some more of his heredity,_ the Prince thought—and her hands were reaching down to him. Iaon took them gently, pressed the backs of them to his forehead, let them pull him up. 

Feeling her touch was like feeling that of the God’s hands—Iaon’s skin not-quite-burning, where it touched hers, with the sense of contact with something greatly desired—but it was much tempered: she was holding the effect back for his sake. As the Prince rose, Aphrodite simply looked at him for a few moments, and Iaon tried to return her regard in an adult manner instead of staring like a lovesick teenager. But then few beings living, be they mortals or Gods, right up to and including Father Zeus himself, could have guaranteed they could do otherwise… so the Prince didn’t feel too badly about it. It was in fact hard to do anything other than smile at her, for after all she was Love, where his oldest loyalties lay. And if the smile came across as a bit adoring, well, worse things could happen. 

After a moment Aphrodite glanced over at the Consulting God and said, “I do so hate losing a really serious devotee, my son. But seeing it’s you he’s going over to... I’m sure I can manage to be gracious about it.” 

“Divine Lady,” said the Prince, smiling at the God, “I’m not leaving your service entirely: not _just_ yet. In fact not ever, I hope.” 

A look went back and forth between the Goddess and her son. “A Prince he may be,” she said, “but I see he’s a courtier too.” And she grinned at the God: such a roguish expression. “Watch out he doesn’t turn you all mannerly when you’re not looking.” 

Iaon couldn’t restrain an ironic half-smile at the very thought. Love might have done many things to the God, but teaching him manners wasn’t one of them. And as for the God, he rolled his eyes at his divine mother and made a supremely annoyed face visible even through his shadows. _“Mum_ myyyyy…!”

Aphrodite gave her son what could only be read as a mother’s indulgent look, still edged with teasing. “Come, Prince,” she said, and turned a less shattering version of that smile on him. _“I_ know what that look means. Shall we walk?”

The Prince bowed to her a little, crooked out an arm for her to take. She slipped her hand through it: they walked up the path. 

When they were safely out of earshot—or what Iaon much hoped was earshot for his God—he bent his head a little over toward the Goddess who was pacing along beside him, looking at the roses, though he strongly suspected she was examining him in ways that didn’t involve sight. “Great Lady,” Iaon said, “so far no one’s given me the ‘Don’t break his heart or you’ll catch a thunderbolt’ talk. Have the other goddesses perhaps shoved that onerous duty off on you?”

“Them?” the Goddess said, glancing back at the Muses, who were suddenly sitting together again and giggling like a lot of schoolgirls over something or other. “Certainly not… that’d be the last thing on their minds. They’re mostly like him, in their way: completely in service to their arts.”

“That’s where he gets it, perhaps.”

“Who can say?” Aphrodite smiled to herself as they went along. “He’s not like any other God: the rules all seem to break when it comes to him.”

“Tell me about it,” Iaon said under his breath. 

She gave him a sidelong look full of amusement and mischief, and the Prince suddenly thought of that first night on the couch in the shadowy Chamber and his suddenly-missing loinwrap, and deduced another possible strand of the God’s heredity. “Yes, I’d say you do know,” said Aphrodite. “Yet indeed, here you are.”

She paused by the beehive a moment, watching the little winged flickers of gold passing busily in and out. “Perhaps I like a challenge,” Iaon said. 

“Certainly you know how to rise to one…” 

Iaon chuckled, for sounding so demure in the depths of innuendo was a gift. “Mighty Goddess, from you I take that very kindly.”

“You’re not exactly in the normal run of mortal, though,” Aphrodite said, “so the match would seem to have potential. Look how you’ve reacted to being here. I would say few mortals who’ve set foot here have been so gifted at treating Gods like, well, like people.”

Her tone made it plain that she didn’t mean this as an insult, which reassured Iaon a good deal. “Perhaps,” Iaon said, “it’s been made easier for me in that the Gods who’ve dealt with me have gone out of their way to be kind.”

“Or perhaps kindness breeds true,” said the Goddess, “and in Heaven as on Earth, you get what you give.” She raised her eyebrows a bit as she turned to look down the path again, toward where the figure wrapped in shadow was now talking to his Mummy Athena, and for once having to look up instead of down. “Well, I should say that’s likely to stand you in good stead.”

And for no reason whatsoever, a shiver ran softly down Iaon’s spine. “Is there something specific I should know about, great Lady?” the Prince said. 

The Goddess of Love laughed softly. “You’re thinking perhaps that prophecy is normally Apollo’s domain,” she said. “Well, nothing specific. But my domain has its own laws. One of them, for good or ill, is that the course of true love rarely does run smooth.” 

For all that the poets’ favorite epithet for her was “laughter-loving”, the look she turned to Iaon now had a touch of the sombre about it. “The greater potential there is in a love,” the Goddess said, “the greater the tests that rise up and array themselves against it, looking for weaknesses… places where the bond will break. You’ve come through the preliminaries, I’d say, quite nicely. But when the parties concerned settle in to establish a status quo…” She sighed. “Then it’s seen what metal the bond between them is made of.”

“Any pointers you might have, great Lady, would be more than welcome.” 

“That we’re standing here at the moment,” she said, “suggests that maybe you need few such from me.” Again that smile, like the dawn coming up, utterly approving: and (in its way) very like what Iaon had so far been able to see of the one of the God’s smiles he liked best, the one not edged with competitiveness or annoyance or half-submerged anger—the one that simply said _The thing you did, the thing you said just then: that made me glad._

“That might be,” Iaon said. “But need is one thing. Desire’s another.” _And of course you’re not making up excuses to keep standing here talking to her, just because she reminds you of every woman you’ve ever held. And in the ways that matter, every man. Of course not._

Her smile went wry, and once more it occurred to Iaon that there was no reason the Goddess couldn’t slide as easily into his mind as Hermes had, or his own God until he swore off. “Not just a wit,” she said, “but a Prince wise enough to know that to God or man there’s no sound as sweet as being asked for advice. Well… still staying off Apollo’s turf, then: just a general warning. When you suddenly become another’s heart—” The Prince blushed at that, had to look aside— “and your own heart finds itself suddenly doing double duty: other parts of you can sometimes irrationally take offence because of how a longstanding inner balance has been disturbed. The mind in particular may suddenly try to prove which part of one rightfully takes primacy. And in your household, I’d say mind would sometimes be an issue…”

Iaon laughed softly. “Saving your grace, great Lady,” he said, “you have _no idea.”_

His tone was as rueful as her expression: but both smiled. “Just have a care,” Aphrodite said. “When feeling runs deepest is when most harm can be done… and both of you are very new at this.” 

The intensity of her smile, for just that moment, was like the God’s when it was turned on him to the exclusion of all else; but there was also a shade of concern to it that went to the Prince’s heart, and for the moment he could do nothing but take the hand that lay on his forearm and, much daring, very gently press the kind of kiss to it that he might have bestowed on his mother’s. “You know how he is,” Iaon said. “All I can promise is to do my best.”

“Let it be as you say,” the Goddess said. “And may that be enough.”

***

He walked her back down to her son, and quiet talk and ease settled in over everything again. Eventually, as the afternoon light started slanting low across the garden, there came a sense that proceedings were coming to an end. Athena was the first to go, mentioning something in her workshop that needed tending to: but Iaon, recognizing the tactic from the God, right down to the all-over twitch that meant _All right, I’ve been here long enough to satisfy basic expectations and now I’m gone,_ simply smiled at her, bowed to her as soldier-to-superior-officer, and told her not to be a stranger. 

A while after that a text spelled itself out in the air over the roses and it was Hermes’s turn to take his leave, corralling the writhing and protesting snakes and muttering about the impossibility of getting a full day off. And finally one by one the Muses made their farewells, preparatory to what Iaon suspected would be a group departure. There was a saying among poets, when speaking of one or another of their number, that he had been “kissed by a Muse”. Now Iaon found himself in the absolutely enviable position of being kissed, over the space of a quarter-hour or so, by every single one of them. _I wonder if my writing will improve?_ Iaon thought, somewhat dazed with delight, as he and the God stood at the end of the walk and watched the Nine wave and then quietly vanish away, like passing sunbeams dissolving in sunset air. 

“Where did Aphrodite go?” Iaon said after a moment. “I didn’t see her leave.”

“She’s Love,” the God said, low and amused. “She hasn’t left.” And he slipped his arm around Iaon and squeezed him again. 

“You great big secret romantic,” Iaon said under his breath. 

The God snorted, but didn’t actually come out with a rebuttal. “It’s her preferred style,” he said. “Half the time no one sees her either going or coming. She ought to be working for Argeiphontês.” He chuckled dark and low. “Except _he’s_ been blindsided by her as many times as any other God in these parts… and the water-cooler chat at the Yard would start getting on his nerves.”

Iaon stretched, and the two of them started back up the walk. “I’d have thought perhaps we’d see one other guest.”

“What? Who?”

“Your Godmother.”

“Oh.” The God shook his head. “No, too late in the season. She’s already gone south for the winter.”

“South? Where?”

“South of _everywhere_ , Iaon.”

“…Oh. Yes, I suppose. Pity, though…” 

“Wouldn’t have thought you’d be eager for that meeting,” the God murmured. “Death in the afternoon…”

“Over hors d’oeuvres? The concept loses a little of its sting.”

“But also, she and my Godfather are why you’re here.”

“All the more reason to want to meet them, then,” Iaon said. “Perhaps I’d like to say ‘thank you.’” 

The God stopped, took Iaon by the elbows and gazed down at him in the lengthening shadows. “You are truly the most extraordinary of mortals,” he said. 

“Then I’m well paired to the most extraordinary of Gods,” Iaon said. “…Whose Mummies all _like_ me, Fates be praised.”

“Yes they do,” the God said, letting go a great breath of absolute relief. “So for Heaven’s sake, now _that’s_ out of the way, let’s get back to work!”

***

But the Work proper was not the first thing on the God’s mind. Within a matter of minutes he was in the bath, with the air of one who intended to be there for a good while. Once the door of the House shut behind him, he hadn’t actually come out and _said_ “Too much stress, too much social nonsense, _too much—!”_ But Iaon had nonetheless read all that in his stance and his face and the way the God started shedding his formal clothes before he was even halfway up the stairs; his overrobe wound up on the sitting room floor and his khiton on the floor of the back hall. A sense of released tension simply started pouring off the God, and once the bathroom door thumped shut, Iaon much doubted he’d see or hear anything significant from the God until he’d completely soaked the day’s stress out of his system. 

Iaon meantime sat himself down by the fire, and after the first few moments spent staring into the flames, let out a long sigh. _Gods,_ Iaon thought: not in the exclamatory sense. The glint of wise sharp grey eyes not his own God’s, the cheerful voices of the Muses laughing and singing something about someone named Adeline, the indescribable fragrance of the hand of the Goddess of Love when he kissed it… _How are these things happening to me?_ he thought. _This life: this amazing life…_

A cluster of glasses came floating in through the sitting room door on their way to the kitchen. “Thalastrae,” Iaon said, “need any help with those?”

Laughter. “Prince, we’re here to wait on _you_! Not really the other way around.”

“Still,” Iaon said. “Now that the pressure’s off, don’t mind stretching the boundaries of my role a little.”

“You just relax,” said another of Thalastrae, and a glass of the Chian came floating out to him. “Kind of a busy day for you.”

“And night,” Iaon said. “And the day before…” He took the glass, sipped, leaned his head back, closed his eyes: smiled. 

“Prince,” said yet another of their voices, far closer to him: just opposite his chair, if he was any judge. “Just so you know….” Her voice was so diffident, so soft. “…He’s always deserved love. Not that he ever saw that. Or would’ve claimed to care, if he had. But what you’ve brought him… You are a blessing.”

Iaon had nowhere to look, no face to look at: but a hand touched his. After a second he laid his on top of it. “But so is he,” Iaon said very softly. “He saved me. From…” He shook his head. “A life where everything’s small and controlled and predictable and _safe_. A life with the usual pains and sorrows. Wound-stitching and boil-lancing and Palace politics and animal husbandry. Bad dreams, and a limp. _Boring.”_ And he laughed gently: at the God’s word, at himself. “Anything I might ever have brought him is a thousand times less than what he gave me even before, before we…” Iaon shook his head, smiled. “Before we found our way. Whatever I brought him, it’s because he brought it to me first.”

The hand he couldn’t see patted his own again. “You’re both so impossible,” Thalastrae said, and the affection and the dry humor in her voice were so perfectly balanced. “No wonder you work together so well.” And he felt the faint breeze of her moving away, and saw the God’s shed clothes on the hallway floor lifted up to be taken away and dealt with. 

Quiet fell as the Thalastrae finished what they needed to do and took themselves away. Iaon sat there in the quiet as the sunset light in the room started slowly to fade. He sipped at the Chian as the shadows in the room’s corners slowly darkened down, and he could feel them looking at him with indolent pleasure.

Iaon smiled back and sighed, and stretched, feeling at loose ends for the time being and not up to doing anything as energetic as looking over his blogging tablets. His eye fell on the dark glass window up on its shelf. _There’s something there hasn’t been time for._ “Westie,” Iaon said, “what’s interesting in the world today?”

Answers normally didn’t come back vocally: this system, when the West Wind wasn’t himself about, was as automated as a clepsydra. But as usual, on hearing the implied request the little pane of dark glass came alight, showing scenes from far away. As usual, some of them made sense to Iaon after some study, and some made none at all. Iaon had come to understand that under some circumstances the West Wind brought the God’s House images from parts of the world that were unknown to anyone in the Greeklands. What confused Iaon more was that sometimes these images apparently came from other times as well. The God’s “simple” explanation of this had been less than clear. The “less simple” explanation had been completely indecipherable, full of long complicated words that though they were put together from Greek roots nonetheless made no kind of sense. After a while, using one of the more underhanded methods—meaning one of the physical ones—Iaon made the God stop explaining and more or less resigned himself to the most bizarre of the things he saw in that window. 

Perhaps in deference to his sensibilities, the images the window showed Iaon when he was on his own were routinely less indecipherable. He could look down city streets right across the Greeklands and beyond, even as far afield as Africa and Persia and Ind. Of late he’d spent some time looking at the sights of the great cities of Ch’in (seeing that he and the God had been eating so much of their food of late) and that empire’s vast landscapes and mountainous places. But exotic travelogues didn’t suit his mood tonight. “Something close to home?” he said. 

The window flickered and showed him more local views: Tiryns in the morning, Argos and Cyllene and other cities of the Argolid as afternoon crept across them in honeyed light—it had been a lovely early-autumn day right across the Peloponnese. Landscape shifted into landscape as the Prince gazed idly at them, finishing his wine and half-listening to the sound of splashing back in the bathroom. The lengthening shadows of declining day fell between the mountains of softly-rounded ranges, golden light trailing over mountainsides and cliffs, shadows stretching down the roads as men and beasts went about their business, little bright splashes of life against the great world: distant, peaceful-looking, unproblematic. The sound of water splashing down the hall paused, resumed, paused again, while Iaon thought of the darkness of the Chamber, and smiled…

The view on the screen shifted again, and Iaon found himself looking at a tall cliffside that caught the late sun, the foot of it in shadow. Just another landscape: except that at the heart of this one, on the flat ground at the bottom of the cliff, a woman in black and white was standing all by herself near a big twisted old olive tree. She was standing quite still, her hands held up: she was praying. Before her lay a shallow rectangular pit full of something wet and dark. _Sacrifice_ , Iaon thought. _Now why in the world—_

But then Iaon lost that train of thought as something cold ran down his back: memory. He knew that tree, and that cliff. He had stood on that stony shelf on Mount Arouania, looking out and away through the hot blue air on the day he thought he was going to die. He had fallen asleep in his armour, with his back against that tree, and awakened with his back against one of the fluted pillars at the end of the walk that led to the House of the Two Hundred Twenty-One Bees. 

But more, much more to the point: he knew that woman. 

Such was his shock on recognizing all of what he was seeing that Iaon didn’t even realize he’d stood up to stare. Now, more shocked still (though in a slower and more disturbing way) as he started taking it all in, the Prince sat down again. He saw various items laid out here and there around the tree, and recognized them all. A curved butcher’s knife, bronze, bone-handled, of the kind one used to cut the throat of an animal. A small broad spade, bronze, with an olivewood haft. A wineskin, flaccid and empty on the ground, its contents spilled out into the shallow rectangular pit that had been carefully dug with the spade. The black lamb with its feet bound, lying dead to one side with its throat cut, its blood all spilled out into the pit to mingle with the wine. It was the normal sacrifice in memory of the soul of a dead loved one, a propitiatory offering to ask the King and Queen Below to be kind to the one in the offerer’s prayers. The brief life in that blood, if the sacrifice was accepted, would make its way in some shadowy form to the dead one, giving them for a little while—as long as it would take the blood to clot—a memory of what the vitality of life had been like, of what it had been like to breathe and move where the sun still shone. 

And then there was Arêtë. She was robed in a long black chlamys over a plain white robe, as was appropriate for a royal princess making a sacrifice to the Gods Below on the royal house’s behalf. And she stood so straight, so tall… 

It had always been one of the things that had driven Iaon crazy when he was a boy. Arêtë had shot up in her early teens like a beautiful slender golden tree, taller than their mother, almost as tall as their father. That was the point at which everyone started watching Iaon to see when _he_ would do the same thing—especially his father, whom Iaon would sometimes catch sighing when he saw Iaon and Arêtë standing together. Soon after this, Iaon made himself a secret place out in the stables where he would take a piece of charcoal and mark his height on one of the heavy load-bearing posts that defined one of the corners of the tack room. Once a week, religiously, when it was stable-cleaning day, he went out with charcoal to make a new mark. But though he made enough new marks for a good while for him to keep his hopes up, they never came near matching his sister’s height. Finally—around the same time that his father stopped sighing when they stood together—Iaon went quietly out and scrubbed that post clean, and got on with the rest of his young life. 

But Arêtë’s growth spurt had had a much more amusing side effect, and this was that the more eligible boys among the noblest local families had started mooning after her in earnest, composing terrible love poems in her honour and lying in wait for her in the streets to sing them. It had been genuinely comical, sometimes. Iaon and his sister would be down the market to pick up a side of lamb or some such, and from around some corner or down the alley between the butchers’ shambles and the smaller market hall would come the plangent sound of a badly-plucked lyre accompanied by some wobbly half-cracked adolescent voice, singing “Faiiiiiiirer than the Moooooon she is…” Arêtë would roll her eyes, and Iaon (being then about nine) would simply fall over guffawing at the idiocy of it. His sister looked all right, but the Moon didn’t really have anything to worry about.

However, during this period Iaon had started to see something that Arêtë herself hadn’t yet really picked up on: that it wasn’t any of the boys she followed with her eyes, but lovely Maira with her ankles always showing a little more under her robes than they should have been, or deep-bosomed Glaucê, or Speio of the raven tresses. At the time Iaon didn’t pay attention to anything more than the bare fact, and that it was funny that she hadn’t yet noticed. But by a couple of years later, when he was eleven going on twelve, she had. And he then realized what Arêtë was realizing at the same time—that unless something happened to change the local situation quite soon, she was going to be married off to some neighboring prince in a matter of a year or three… and that would change everything. 

Arêtë had always been physically active, athletic, independent, impatient of limits: all characteristics which her parents had tried (completely unsuccessfully) to teach her to restrain or at least manage, as once she was someone’s Queen these would have to be laid aside or at the very least controlled. But this other set of preferences promised even more dangerous consequences if indulged. A Queen or Princess-consort might be physically interested in the ladies of her court, but if she was ever caught _doing_ anything about that interest, her kingly husband would be within his rights to have her cast out of the royal family for her infidelity, and probably exiled. _Or worse,_ Iaon thought: _an insecure or jealous husband could have some kind of “accident” happen to her._ He twitched a little to think that this was the kind of case the God might be called in on these days, if the family had divine blood in their history within a generation or two… 

Iaon rubbed at his face, feeling an old sorrow settling over him again—the loss of the irrepressible daredevil of a sister, always spirited but so often gentle, whom he’d idolized in his earliest childhood. She was always full of plots and schemes, always fun to be around, sometimes even a bit dangerous; protective of Iaon, but at the same time so often urging him to do mad and daring things. And now, thinking of it, Iaon wondered whether the reason he’d found it so easy to fall in love with the God was that he’d first loved these personality traits in his sister. It had never felt fair to Iaon that Arêtë was supposed to be the one to give up what made her uniquely herself on becoming a woman, while he got to stay as he was on becoming a man. He suspected she was far more angry and bitter about it privately than he had ever been openly. But whatever else anyone might say about Arêtë, his sister wasn’t stupid. Right through her mid-teens she kept her mouth shut publicly as regarded the fate she knew was fast coming toward her if something didn’t happen to change her state. 

The King and Queen had put off making the first moves toward arranging a marriage for Arêtë until rather late. They were expecting her to quiet down and tire of the childhood games; they thought that (like other girls of royal blood before her) as she got older she’d get bored with being the least important in a houseful of royals, and start itching to be mistress of her own house elsewhere. In the summer of her fifteenth year, while Arêtë was in the depths of a profound (and profoundly reciprocated) crush on raven-tressed Speio, who was the daughter of a City nobleman, her parents misread her presently somewhat subdued mood—she was in the heavy-sighing-and-poetry-writing stages of the crush—as a sign that Arêtë was starting to calm down. Shortly thereafter the two of them began privately discussing which of the local princes might most successfully be approached on Arêtë’s behalf. But Arêtë overheard one of these conversations. The next month, during the vintaging festival that accompanied the grape harvest, a band of Bacchantes came through the City to bless the winemaking. When they left, Arêtë and Speio went with them. 

Initially this was taken as a last tomboyish fling, a farewell to childhood. Had Arêtë and Speio come home again in a few days, chastened and disillusioned (or even claiming to be so) on finding that the reality of the Bacchante’s life didn’t match the over-romanticised images of it, nothing further would have been said. But Speio—much distressed—came back a week later, and Arêtë did not. _That_ was when things got serious: and even more so when people were sent out to search for her, but she would not be found. There were only a few such searches, for even though it might be a King commanding them, people were rightly nervous about interfering in what might have been a genuine vocation to the God of the Vine. For one thing, royals had become Bacchantes before. For another, there were numerous whispered horror stories of death and madness surrounding those who interfered unduly with Dionysus’s worshippers. 

Arêtë did not return home until the threshold of winter, at which point the damage to her eligibility and her marriage prospects was done—it being assumed, with no particular evidence, that anyone living a Bacchante’s life was not overly concerned with the identities or quality of whatever guests might drop by to share in their divinely sozzled worship of the God. “They could be getting up to anything out there,” Iaon remembered hearing someone whisper in a taverna in the City, before they’d realized that their Prince was sitting in the shadows having a cup of hot wine on that cold day. “King’s own daughter, who knows who she’s been doing, who she’s been with? Sleep with bad company, you get that way too. Lucky we don’t have to worry about her ever being on the throne…” The man had only had a few moments to realize the identity of the angry young man looming over him before Iaon’s first punch sent him sprawling to the taverna floor. Iaon’s father had initially been furious with Iaon for “brawling in the tavern like some drunken navvy”; though when both their tempers had calmed and Iaon had told him how it started, the King had sat back and rubbed his face and said, “How can I blame you for doing what I wish I could do myself?…” and sent him on his way. 

So it was done: Arêtë was a Bacchante, lost to the royal house and (mostly) to Iaon’s life. Over time he learned not to speak of her overmuch. At home it just caused his parents more pain, and in public it caused situations where he had to restrain himself from assaulting the Kingdom’s less understanding subjects. As time went by, though, Iaon found that the nasty fictions about his mostly-absent sister mattered less to him than the uncomfortable truths. The popular image of bands of beautiful young maidens tripping about in the forest dressed in leopardskins and waving their pinecone-tipped wands, all out of their heads on wine and the love of the God of the Vine, and otherwise without a care in the world, was far distant from the truth. Or rather, it was close to it in a very specific way. Living unhoused in the mountains was not easy, and mostly Bacchantes died young—either (as legend had it) from too much ecstatic communion with Dionysus, or of any number of diseases associated with exposure, chronic malnutrition, poor sanitation, and a rugged lifestyle spent far from human habitations. Even the lucky ones, those who survived into middle age—like his sister—having usually already said goodbye to their beauty early in the process, could look forward to a life in which there would be no physical comfort in their lives any more until they gave it all up and came back, essentially defeated, to the world of men. 

_And what would have awaited her then?_ Iaon thought. _Of course she’d have come home..._ for, as the saying went, home was the place where, when you came there, they had to take you in. And (in that time when Iaon was still living in the Kingdom) what would Arêtë find? Just as Iaon’s duty was to reign, a princess’s duty was to take a husband and reign by his side, or to be married into another royal line. But that would be impossible now: no king or prince near or far would have her. If she chose to stay single, she would be limited to a low-profile life in the royal household, submerged in the inevitable housework that ruled the lives of every Palace woman from the Queen on down. And when she went out, there would always be whispers in the street about the aging woman, once so promising, such a beauty, now assumed to be damaged goods. It would be a bitter life for the once-proud princess of Iaon’s memories.

Nor would honourable marriage have been easy for Arêtë to find, even if she wanted it. Members of the royal family were not permitted to marry lower than the uppermost two ranks of the Kingdom’s nobles, for fear of diluting what few drops of divine blood might possibly linger in their veins. (The family was supposedly descended from one of Apollo’s plethora of sons, but Iaon had gone over the genealogy when he was young—having had the inevitable nine-year-old’s fantasies of someday turning up Phaeton-like on the doorstep of the Farshooter’s holiday home to claim his divine heritage—and had found the whole thing was probably due to a spelling error.)

And all that left aside the question of whether Arêtë _would_ want to marry, even if something of the kind could be arranged. Because that would be how it would have to be done: a substantial brideprice would have to be paid to some one of the Kingdom’s nobles to take this woman who could almost certainly no longer bear children and who wasn’t that much to look at compared to the fresh young maidens of other noble families who would be jockeying for the same man’s attention. This nobleman would then (if Iaon was any judge of them as a group) start to throw his political weight around on the strength of his marriage to a woman who didn’t particularly want him—which would be no secret: nothing stayed secret in the Kingdom for long. Even were Iaon still at home, such a man would start seeing himself as heir-presumptive to the Kingdom, behind Iaon, due to the lack of any legitimate offspring of the Prince’s own loins. He would be waiting for the King to die: possibly even willing to hasten the situation along. _More work for the God,_ Iaon thought. _More to the point: he’d have been willing to hurry_ me _along too. Well, he might have had a little more trouble with that_. He smiled grimly. …But at the end of the day, this was the kind of thing that started wars. And at the end of it all, poor Arêtë would still be wretched. 

Iaon slumped in his chair and found himself slipping into a darker mood than he’d felt for some time: brooding, in fact. While Iaon had been alive and at home in the Kingdom, and the above thoughts had gone through his mind, he’d sometimes hoped—in a terrible, guilty way he’d never dared share with anyone—that some quick and merciful accident would carry Arêtë off before she had to give up the (admittedly difficult) freedom of her Bacchante’s life for the daily bitterness that would likely be her lot until she died. Now his heart seized a little inside him as the thought came to him: was sudden death on the hills perhaps a fate Arêtë had _also_ been hoping for? Had her intent been not merely to put herself outside the marriage market by force, but also—if she was lucky—to die young, because death seemed preferable to any other life available to her? 

Iaon moaned softly at the thought, rubbing his eyes. He had in his adult life been amused at Arêtë, exasperated with her, sorry for her, furious with her; until now it hadn’t really occurred to him that he might have cause to _pity_ her. Which only made things that much worse. 

And the whole question of duty left him feeling sore around the edges, too. _He_ wasn’t exactly fulfilling _his_ duties either. _Well, that’s hardly_ my _fault! How was I to know that King Hades was going to have a fit of insecurity over a local improvement in medical standards?_ But now the position Arêtë was in was a direct result of Iaon’s change in status. 

Iaon pinched the spot where nose met brows, shook his head. _I have been nothing but trouble to her,_ he thought morosely, _since the day I was born. But there has to be some way I can help her now. I live on Mount_ Olympus _, for Gods’ sake. There must be some string the God could pull for me. Maybe somebody needs a priestess._

_But would she even want that? Oh God, this is terrible…_

He looked up again at the image frozen in the West Wind’s little glass window. Arêtë, straight, tall, proud, queenly in her robe and cloak, hands lifted in the gesture of prayer, that golden head erect. _Not so golden any more,_ Iaon thought sadly. It had been like the ripe wheat at the end of the summer, so rich and deep a colour, and beautifully heavy and thick. Now despite the way it was bound up he could see that it was far thinner, the gold of it much faded and the gray coming into it, as it had been coming into his own in recent years. _It wasn’t like I didn’t see you when you came through after the feast, when we sent the Lady Xanthe home. How did I not see then what your life has been doing to you? Why has it taken this to make me see?_

 _Or not to see. To_ observe…

The image’s freeze let go, and after a few moments more Arêtë’s hands dropped, the prayer completed. She stood there, her face not visible from this angle. But Iaon didn’t need to see her face. He saw her shoulders slump, all the upright pride seeping out of her posture as if out of a crack in a broken vessel; a weight of pain and weariness and grief pouring back into her frame, from which she had managed to exclude it for a while. Slowly Arêtë folded down onto her knees and even more slowly covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders began to shake, and didn’t stop. The grief bent her down double on herself like a tree snapped by some winter tempest and left cast on the ground to wither.

Iaon’s eyes burned. 

“Stop that,” he said, freezing the image again. Hastily he got up from his chair and went to make tea. As Iaon stood in the kitchen by the kettle, waiting for it to boil, he rubbed his eyes and tried to get control of his breath and find some balance in his thoughts. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known long ago what his sister’s life would eventually do to her. After all, a Bacchante’s calling was understood to be a kind of living restatement of humanity’s relationship with wine and its God. If used in moderation it elevated, it enriched life: if abused, used to excess, it could drive you to frenzy, even kill you. Bacchantes lived that life, risked that life, to remind those around them of that eternal verity. And they said (or Arêtë had) that the risk was worth it. In return for devotion to Dionysus you got the direct experience of the God, the ecstasy of his special presence among those who had cast their mundane lives away and devoted themselves exclusively to his worship. 

But being outside such devotion, Iaon had often before found himself questioning the tradeoff. Now he was revisiting that old argument. Which was worth more: the ecstasy, or a full human life of the normal length?—insofar as that could be guaranteed to anyone. He thought of that chilling sentiment from some Scythian poem someone had recited on a cold night around the campfire, out on campaign long ago: _heroes are made for fame, not for long living._ And the same could be said about those who served the Gods. Whether you were serving Ares or Dionysus, _no_ service could be entirely safe: otherwise it lost its value. In fact, actively serving _any_ God was like enough to get you killed. 

_And what about loving one?_ said something small and chilly in the back of Iaon’s mind. _What will_ that _get you?_

Iaon scowled, banished the thought immediately. The kettle boiled and clicked itself off. Iaon made the tea, and then leaned back against the counter, gazing sightlessly at the floor, his arms folded. _But warrior or Maenad, man or woman or child died young, all of us come to the same place in the end. Except for the tiniest percentage of humanity, it’s the Shades for all of us: the grey eternity, nothing to touch, no action, no passion, just the shadows of what went before. Is Arêtë’s way possibly the right one after all? Doesn’t it make sense to seize as much life, as much passion as you can, while you’re still breathing under the sun?_

Iaon was lost enough in his thoughts that as he poured his tea and walked back into the sitting room, he didn’t hear the bathroom door open. He was standing in front of the fire, gazing into the flames and about to have a drink of the tea, when a hand came from behind him, plucked the mug away from him and put it on the table by his chair. Then the God was there, in his bathrobe and his shadows, turning Iaon around and urgently pulling him close. “Iaon. What is it? I could feel you.”

“Nothing.” He took a breath. “It’s nothing.”

It was so bald-faced and useless a lie that he was instantly ashamed of himself. Iaon expected the God to turn on him one of the typical scornful expressions with which he might have favored a suspect who was making some pitiful attempt to deceive him. But the God simply looked down at him from quite close, out of his shadow, and said, concerned but also amused, “Iaon, even _before_ yesterday you were a terrible liar…”

Iaon laughed short and sharp at that, and at himself. “True.”

“Just tell me what’s the matter.”

“Look,” Iaon said. He turned himself in the God’s arms, waving at the little glass window.

The God nodded at it. It began replaying the final sequence of moving images Iaon had been watching. “…Your sister,” the God said. 

“Yes.”

“The robes are those of a royal performing a formal function on behalf of her house,” the God said. 

Iaon nodded. “They’ll have recalled her and made her Crown Princess again,” he said. “Won’t really have had a choice, with the male heir presumed dead. My mother and father may know otherwise, but they won’t have contradicted the Kingdom’s council of nobles when they insisted on it.”

They just stayed as they were for a while, the God’s arms around the Prince from behind, both of them looking at the little glass window. “So now it gets even more complicated than it would have been when I was still there,” Iaon said under his breath. “We’re too far west to have any tradition of ruling Queens who go to war; and at the end of the day, kingship is about defense of your territory. Now my Kingdom’s got an heir to the throne who can’t rule securely in her own recognizance. The pressure on Arêtë to marry will already be starting.” He rubbed his face. “At least now she has some _chance_ of marrying—which will still be the last thing she wants. And so I’ve screwed up her life _again.”_

“Iaon,” said the God. “You’ve screwed up nothing. The Fates have perhaps laid an unusual path before her…” 

“Seems to be running in the family at the moment,” Iaon said, and pinched his nose at the bridge. 

But the God merely shook his head. “What’s to be done?” he said. “Your life is yours, now, and hers is hers.”

Iaon took a long breath. “I really want to see her.”

The God stared at him. 

“She’s suffering,” Iaon said. “You can see that.”

“When you felt that your parents were suffering,” the God said, “you didn’t ask to see them. You just sent them a message.”

“I… I didn’t dare ask more of you then,” Iaon said. “I had no idea what I might be disturbing. Or whether there would be danger for you, or them, in what I wanted. Now…” He shrugged, because it was strange, in its way. “I suppose I saw my mother and father as strong enough to cope without anything more… personal. More intimate.” He let out a sad breath. “But—I know it sounds strange—even though we rubbed each other the wrong way so much when we got older, Arêtë and I were always close. And, my God… _look at her._ Her life was painful enough before this. Now everything she had, everything she was, is changed because of _me._ Because of what she thinks has happened to me.” 

Something in the air between them went strangely pained. Iaon’s eyes went wide, and instantly he turned and gathered the God closely to him. “Don’t think I blame you! _Never_ think that. But there must be, I don’t know, _something_ that can be done…” He shook his head. “My God… so much of what I am is because of what she is. What she taught me to be. That’s a debt, in its way. I owe her. And I can’t just see her like this and _leave_ her this way.”

The God in his arms was very, very still. It was strange to feel him that way: normally he was always either just finishing some motion or beginning a new one. “Iaon,” the God said. _“You can’t go back there._ It’s a delicate enough business, you being _here_ at the moment. If you suddenly appear _there_ , living, then we’re right back where we started. A healer who knows too much is about in the Greeklands. And this time it’ll be even worse, my Prince, because everyone will jump to the conclusion that you’ve come back from the dead. That you’ve defeated Death himself.” The God took a long breath. “This time Hades won’t stop to consult his godson, Iaon. He’ll find you, wherever in the world you are… and you’ll be in the Shades a breath later.” _And lost to me forever!_ the God’s heart cried in a spasm of silent terror. 

“I know,” Iaon said. “I know.” He bowed his head. 

And then it struck him, and he looked up. “But why can’t she come here?”

The God was silent. 

Iaon hardly noticed: the solution was already starting to spread itself out before him. “You’ve said the House itself protects what happens inside these grounds from the sight of other Gods, from the outside world. If Arêtë comes _here…_ no one in Heaven or Earth needs to know! Except Westie, if he brings her here and takes her home after. But his confidentiality agreement with you will cover that. And Arêtë doesn’t even need to know exactly where this is, does she? You can so wrap the place in shadows that she won’t be able to see a thing past the edge of the grounds.”

Still the God had not moved. His head was bowed and his eyes were closed. “Iaon,” he said. “I spoke to you once before about something dangerous coming toward us. Something the details of which were… resistant to deduction.” 

The God said this as if it was an admission he was reluctant to make. Iaon nodded. But he didn’t look away from the little glass window and its frozen image. “What we’re seeing here,” the God said, “this is tied up with that somehow.”

Iaon shook his head. It was rare enough for the God to admit to any kind of unease. But it was equally rare for Iaon to exercise his stubbornness, and if ever there was a time, this was it. “You know as well as I do,” Iaon said after a moment, “that sometimes you do the dangerous thing, not just for pleasure, but because it’s the right thing to do. …The human thing.”

The God was still for some seconds. “I know far less about how to be human than you do, my Prince,” he said at last. “And there are aspects of ‘the human thing’ that give me pause. Think of Bellerophon and the woman who ‘loved him’ so much she wanted him dead. Of the man who snatched King Aithlios’s fiancée and kept her in a cage because he ‘loved her—’”

“My God,” Iaon said. “Arêtë’s not like that. _Nothing_ like that. All I want to do is let her see for herself that I’m not dead. That I’m in a good place. Look…” He sighed. “She’s not like my mother and father. She’s not at all subtle, not a deep thinker. I mean, neither am _I_ … but she’s way less so, and she knows it. It wasn’t anything that we ever talked about, but I used to see her face sometimes when people who were making a fuss over me as a little boy would go on about how smart I was. And though they never came out and said it, there was always more to that sentence. ‘…Not like the other one.’” He leaned against the God, put his face down against his shoulder. “I could hear it quite clearly. And once or twice I saw her face and I knew she heard it too. Saw how it hurt her. Just one more way she’d never be able to compete with the new Crown Prince.”

“Iaon…”

He sighed again, shook his head as he looked over at that window. “Nods and winks and covert messages won’t cut it with Arêtë, my God. She’s very direct, very physical. Which makes the solution simple. Just let her once put her hands on me and feel my pulse, let her sit down with me and eat and drink and see me do things that the dead just can’t do, and she’ll be all right. Once she’s done that, she’ll find the strength to go on with what has to be done in her life. And she _needs_ that strength, my God. I owe it to her to help her find it.”

The God was so quiet, so still, as the shadows drew in around the two of them in the sitting room. Iaon could feel his concern in them, as if he was in the Chamber and all the little eyeless shapes were looking at him in silent trepidation. But finally the God lifted a hand to Iaon’s face, tilted his head around and up to meet his eyes. 

“You know I can’t deny you anything you ask,” the God said. “So, all right, let it be as you say. But I need a little to work out how to do this. Logistically… it’s complicated.”

Iaon leaned his face against the God’s shoulder again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “So sorry. It’s been kind of an interesting day or two for me… and maybe I’m just more wrung out than usual, emotionally. But seeing that…” He waved one hand at the little dark-glass window. 

“Her grief grieves you,” the God said. His voice was low, a bit uncertain. “Iaon, you know my feelings about sentiment. But this I understand: what you’ve seen makes you unhappy.” And one of those warm hands was stroking through Iaon’s hair now. “For you to be unhappy is unacceptable. So this will be put right.”

“Thank you,” Iaon said, and drew the shadow-veiled face down to his own: pressed his lips to the God’s lips. “Thank you very much.”

“Anything for you, my Iaon. You know that.”

“I _do_ know. Because you’ve given me so very much already...”

The God smiled, waved the little glass window dark again. “By all means,” he said, resting his head on top of Iaon’s as they looked into the fire, “let’s stand here and argue about who’s given whom more.”

Iaon found himself actually able to smile a bit now as the pained tightness in his chest started to give way. Everything was going to be all right: how could it not? His God was on his side. “Says the patron God of Posh Grammar.” 

“Well, one must teach you _somehow.”_

“Oh, _must_ one.” Iaon chuckled. _“Erato_ didn’t care about whether my grammar was posh or not. She said she’d never seen such suggestive inflexions.”

“Oh, my Prince… don’t tell me you were actually reciting love poetry to the Mistress of Erotic Verse? _In broad daylight?”_

“Kissed Aphrodite, too. It’s been that kind of day. Who knows what might happen if you catch me while the mood’s right? I might recite some of that poetry to _you.”_

Moments later the door to the Chamber opened, and shut: and the shadows in the sitting room flocked down the hallway to catch up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Notes and links for Chapter 24 are here ](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/41601975439/chapter-24-notes-and-links)at the [Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com)


	25. Of the God's Data-Gathering and a Visit To Town

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The healer-Prince starts having second thoughts about his sister visiting the House of the Two Hundred Twenty-One Bees: the Consulting God gets to grips with a strange new facet of the Work, and lays down the law.
> 
> _Warnings for intimations of mortality, family angst, deductions and suppositions, sibling issues, missing persons, mixed motivations, and cats._

The Consulting God woke early in the darkness: woke suddenly, his eyes flicking fully open so that he lay gazing up into the hazy starlight, all awake at once, as if a case was in progress. His chest felt strange as he lay there on his back, something within it aching, uneasy.

He turned his head on the pillow and saw his Prince lying beside him on his stomach, as he sometimes did when he was most deeply asleep—one arm slipped up half under the pillow, head turned toward him, chin tucked down, the shadow-fell that had been pulled up high earlier now slipped down to bare the muscular upflexed shoulders, the curve of strong back toward the waist. “Iaon,” the God whispered, just a bare breath of sound.

No response. The soft breathing went on untroubled, that beautiful back rising and falling gently with it. In the dimness the God’s eyes went to the scar on the left shoulder, the spot where some mortal’s spear had come plunging down while the Prince was hauling a stricken comrade out of the melee to stanch his wounds. The God quietly levered himself up on one elbow, looking down on the sleeping form and the pale, torn place where bronze had marked Iaon with its bitter kiss long before the God had a chance to press his own lips to the Prince’s flesh. Once again, as often before, the urge rose up in him to hunt down the vile mortal responsible for this outrage and smite him straight into the deepest pits of Tartarus as proper punishment for nearly destroying the most precious thing in a God’s whole world. _But Iaon would not approve,_ he thought, watching the breath come and go a few more times. _And so I’ll do no such thing. O my Prince… what have you done to me? Who am I becoming at your hands?_

He reached out to gently stroke the curve of that shoulder, and then froze. A sudden flicker of imagery startled the God, like something surfacing from a dream, or a memory wind-whirled out of its proper place in his Palace of the Mind and looking for somewhere to come to rest. This scar, these shoulders, bowed before him in some shadowy twilight, the Prince’s head tucked down, face hidden; and some unfamiliar voice moaning in distant anguish, _What have you done to me…?_

A second later the vision had faded. The God held quite still, attempting to classify it. _…Some fragment of a dream,_ he decided at last. He was little enough bothered by such that he’d never troubled to speak to the House about any sort of protection for himself of the kind he’d had it enact for Iaon. Normally his mind was better disciplined than to allow such meaningless random discharges of imagery to surface during his waking hours. But unusual events had been afoot of late. _Doubtless something to do with all yesterday’s fuss,_ the God thought; _peculiar, but ultimately meaningless._

There were, in any case, other concerns to be dealt with: the business of Iaon’s annoying sister chief among them. _What did West Wind mean, troubling Iaon with images of that woman?_ the God thought. _A waste of his time. And a danger._ Annoying, too, in that the God couldn’t deduce in what way the trouble approaching the two of them would involve her.

He could simply have forbidden Iaon to have anything to do with the woman: made something up, some reason the putative meeting would be impossible. But the God couldn’t shake the thought that this approach would have been would be unwise. _For after all, say ‘dangerous’ and there he is._ And also, Iaon was growing increasingly able at knowing the God’s mind—at least as regarded the ways the God might try to unilaterally manage the bond that lay between them…

Beside him, Iaon shifted a little, sighed. Slowly one eye opened, blinked once or twice, focused on the God: and the Prince’s face produced one of those endlessly eloquent half-smiles, the eye crinkling with it. “Morning?” Iaon said, making a greeting and a question and a joke of it all at once—there never being any way for him to tell what time it was in the Chamber by the light, and the God being in no hurry to install any timepieces.

“Yes,” the God said, and slid down and over to put his face by Iaon’s, cushioning it on the upstretched arm and pressing his lips to Iaon’s shoulder.

The half-smile gained a little more curve. “You sleep all right?”

“Insofar as necessary,” the God said, and reached out now to complete the unfinished thought of a little earlier, stroking down Iaon’s back. “How are you feeling?”

Iaon stretched a bit and rolled one shoulder, then the other. “Kind of stiff this morning,” he said. “The legs, too. Standing all day, even when you’re having fun…” He chuckled. “Tough work, dancing attendance on a crowd of goddesses. Even without all that much dancing.”

The God smiled slightly, having seen Mummy Terpsichore attempting to get Iaon to boogie down with her late in mid-afternoon, when the wine’s effects on everyone had been at a high. In the aftermath, everyone had agreed (when they could breathe again from laughing) that the lawn chair that had inadvertently become involved in the proceedings would never be quite the same. “Perhaps you should have a soak.”

“Not a bad idea. Assuming that someone hasn’t used all my pine essence _again.”_

The God’s smile stretched into a grin, if a tender one. “And how should I be faulted if I sometimes like to smell like you?”

“You smell wonderful just as you are.”

The God chuckled deep. “Wasn’t what you said when I fell into that midden in Argos.”

“Oh, _now_ you admit you fell into it instead of claiming that I tripped you! Just so you can use my own words against me.”

“Iaon! The very thought.”

The Prince rolled over and took the God in his arms, wincing a little as he wrapped them around him. “See there,” the God said, leaning his forehead against his Prince’s. “You were right.”

 _“I_ was right?”

“You do need a bath. Or a good hot shower, perhaps.”

The Prince smiled, stroking the God’s back, his hands pausing above the God’s hips to knead and massage the muscles there. The God sighed in bliss. “I suppose. After all that terrible hard work…”

“Mmm,” the God said, letting his eyes drift half-closed. _“And_ all the exercise that followed.”

Iaon chuckled. “Not exactly something you regret in the afterglow.”

“Regardless. How often do I get a chance to prescribe for my physician?”

“Prescribe? You mean order. Bossy git.” The Prince’s lips found the God’s, and for a sweet short while the God allowed himself to be silenced in the only way he would ever willingly permit.

After a little, the Prince stretched again, winced again. “Got a point there, all the same. …Tea first, though.” He sat up, stretched again, yawned, and slipped off the couch; picked up his dressing gown from where it had most recently been dropped, pulled it on, and headed into the bathroom.

The God watched the door close behind Iaon, his mind snapping back almost instantly to the issue of the Prince’s family. “…The _sister,”_ he hissed softly, and all around him the shadows gathered at the edges of the Chamber darkened, twitching and shivering with his annoyance. _I should have looked more closely into her business from the start. In any case, I dare not let the woman anywhere near Iaon, or my House, without far better data._

 _Time to sort_ that _out, then._

…Yet it was problematic, troublesome, the reading of hearts, no matter how necessary it might be. It meant immersion in sentiment, emotion, the messy side of mortal life. Only with Iaon, before the God promised to stop it, was sliding into a mortal’s heart ever anything like easy or pleasant. The God far preferred the clean cool business of deduction, always a matter of rationality, control, precision, and most of all, observation from a safe distance outside. Yet—much though he hated to admit it—there were places where even deduction, even as _he_ practiced it, could not take him. Sometimes laying open the tablets of the heart was the only way: sometimes you had to be _sure_. And this was such a time.

_So best get on with it._

The God slipped off the couch, found pyjama bottoms and a short soft tunic, threw his own dressing gown over all, and headed into the flat. Iaon was still in the bathroom, and the God, already deep in planning, wandered over to the window and paused there, gazing out. The garden was quiet under mid-morning sunlight, the Bees going about their business: all seemed at peace. But peace was far from the God’s mind now as he began laying his plans for what must next be done. And behind the planning, beneath it, were other thoughts in their way just as edged and troubling… as he considered who had been in the garden, yesterday, and who had not. But when considered closely, the element missing from yesterday’s party was more a positive sign than a negative one. _After all, the House is protected ground. If Mykroft had come here, it would mean official notice would have to have been taken of the shift in matters between Iaon and me—very likely with unfortunate results. Best to let sleeping gods lie…_

Quickly sinking deep into the details of the course of action he would now need to pursue, the God never heard the kettle click behind him. He blinked, a few moments later, to find Iaon standing by him, his shoulder leaning against the God’s as he handed the God a cup. “Are we expecting someone?”

“Not today,” the God murmured.

“Tomorrow?” Iaon said.

The God shook his head, not turning toward him, and sipped his tea.

The Prince raised his eyebrows as he had a drink of his own. ”Yesterday?”

That made the God quirk an eyebrow and glance sideways at his Prince, who was regarding him with one of those quietly shrewd expressions that meant he was (after his own manner) employing the God’s methods. “You were concerned, yesterday. You said we weren’t missing anyone you wanted to see. Care to amplify on that?”

“…No,” the God said. “No point in it now.”

The expression with which Iaon was favoring him said that his Prince knew the God had something on his mind that was bothering him. But for the moment he said nothing—just had another drink of his tea and gazed down into the garden as well. “Whatever,” Iaon said, “just as well no one else turned up. What with one thing and another, enough was going on. Between Greyeyes pumping me for blogging tech, and coping with Kypris’s jokes…” He snickered.

The God’s eyes widened a bit. _“Kypris??”_

Iaon started to laugh in earnest. “You weren’t there for that, were you? No, you were off ranting at Dolios about something. Oh, my dear _God,_ your divine Mummy’s language when she gets a few in her! She could teach _sailors._ And the filthy jokes—”

The God was bemused. “Iaon, wait. She _told_ you to call her Kypris?”

“She did.” Iaon was shaking his head in affectionate amusement. “She’d been at that pink retsina for a while. Easily three big glasses of it… that I _saw_.” The Prince had another drink of his tea. “I was tempted to say something and thought better of it. But _why_ would she stand there drinking that stuff while we had all those other wines on hand? Dionysus’s best, and she goes for—”

“Backstreet plonk,” the God said. He smiled slightly. “Well, my Prince, you’re a military man. You’re more likely than most to know what they tend to serve at the wineshops where they, ah…”

“Cater to soldiers on leave? The places where golden Aphrodite’s more professional devotees are to be found?” One of Iaon’s wryer smiles manifested itself. “The ladies and gentlemen of the horizontal persuasion… Well.” He grinned. “Maybe that’s something you don’t discuss with your beloved’s Mummy the very first time she comes calling.”

“Not that you’d have ever have actually broached the topic,” the God said, amused. “You could hardly have been much more smitten with her, my Prince. But you were so restrained and sweet about it that no one could possibly have taken offense. And she was plainly charmed.” …This being a fact that had left the God practically weak with relief. His Mummy Aphrodite could when _un_ -charmed be extraordinarily dangerous… as even Father Zeus had discovered on any number of occasions.

Iaon gave the God a look. “I wasn’t _sweet.”_

The God said nothing: merely smiled. The Prince looked at him while expression after expression fleeted across his face: surprise, chagrin, resignation. “Fine,” Iaon muttered at last, “sweet, whatever.” And he sighed, a last expression settling in: amusement. “So now what? What’s on today?”

“I have some work in hand,” the God said, taking a drink of his own cooling tea and turning away from the window. “Nothing very involved. Go,” he said, waving a languid hand in the air, “have a bite to eat and have that bath; give the hot water a workout. Shan’t be long.”

Iaon drew him close and kissed him, then wandered back into the kitchen with his tea. Not long after, the God, showered and dressed, pulled the Shadowcloak off the hook on the back of the sitting room door, swirled it about him, and was gone.

***

He let West Wind bring him most of the way, since he wanted a word with him—indeed several words—about Westie’s spectacular thoughtlessness in general, and his unforgivable part in the disruption that was about to befall the Consulting God’s household in particular. After a while, though, the God realized he might as well have saved his breath. Westie insisted in great annoyance that what the House’s media system showed the viewer was hardly _his_ responsibility. When it was running on automatic, it showed the viewer what he desired or needed to see because that was how the God had _told_ him to set it up in the first place. And who knew what kind of things a _mortal_ needed to see? If he wanted filters installed, fine, but he’d thank the God not to complain to him _before_ the fact—

The God changed tack and started taking Westie to task about some other improvements to the system that he’d been wanting for a while. But the God’s impatience and the Wind’s resulting crankiness between them made for a far less smooth ride than might normally have been be expected. As a result the God was more than usually glad when West Wind finally set him down not far from the gates of the Prince’s small City. The clear air turbulence always secondary to one of Westie’s foul moods had made it harder than usual for the God to continue background processing on the plans he had in hand. And the Shadowcloak’s one red eye—squeezed shut in silent anguish for many minutes—declined to open again just yet. Used as it was to elegantly bypassing mere common physical space along the shortest possible path and with a minimum of fuss, the spiteful addition of unnecessary extra vector quantity to transport always made it queasy.

Fortunately the God required little from the Cloak at the moment but its most straightforward, well, _cloaking_ functions. Unseen and silent, the God started out to make his way briefly about the streets of the City as he’d done months before, more for purposes of doing a brief comparison of current conditions against his earlier baseline assessment than any urgent need of deduction. _An hour or so should be sufficient,_ he thought; _much_ _more would become boring. Then after that, off to the Palace._ But in the meantime he meant to scratch a little itch of curiosity about whether there were differences in the daily life of this place in the absence of his Prince.

The Consulting God soon found that nothing seemed much changed. The mortals were going about their business quite as they’d done before, laughing and weeping and eating and drinking and plotting and scheming in their small mortal way, living their brief hectic lives as if they were actually worth something; being born over here, expiring over there. All this mapped closely onto the evaluations the God had made during his initial investigation; so going by the evidence, at least the place wasn’t on the verge of collapse due to Iaon’s absence. His Prince would be glad to hear it.

But in this new exploration of the City the God soon found a difference having to do with Iaon that was most unexpected. Fairly quickly he realized that he was seeing more than before in the way the mortals’ bodies moved, and in the expressions on their faces. He could still deduce them as he always would have—a bitter childhood here, the sunken-in cachectic thinness indicative of a swift-growing cancer there. But along with the sadness or the thinness now came something peculiar that he previously wouldn’t have felt: flashes of an urgency too poignant for mere sorrow, a desire to _do_ something about the pains he perceived. _Iaon_ , the God thought. It was as if every now and then the Prince was invisibly beside him, commenting on what was seen; or as if an unexpected layer of understanding had been added to his own, but this one uniquely Iaon’s, suffused with his concerns.

By no means were all the added perceptions painful or sad. There were flashes of amusement or delight, moments of pleasure or simple satisfaction in response to some of the mortals the God met. And even some places or objects produced these second-hand responses, occasionally even more strongly than those provoked by living beings. In such cases, the God’s deduction, as he began to get to grips with this strange new phenomenon, was that these people or places were places that Iaon knew well, some meaning more to him than others.

The sight of the old mounting-block just inside the city gates, for example: _that_ brought up a strange sudden mingled sense of excitement and dread and delight. _Excitement because this was the only place in his life’s day where the unexpected might possibly find him anymore,_ the God instantly reasoned. _Dread because Iaon feared not being able to make a difference to the ones who sought his help. Delight when he found he_ could _help them after all—_ But there was more to the delight than just that, as something strange began to spread deep and warm in his chest, and the God could _feel_ Iaon seeing this old worn piece of stone and thinking: _This is where_ he _came to me. Here’s where we first touched. Good old chunk of rock, you may have been cold as ice in most weathers and hard on the arse every day, but who knew you’d ever become a holy place, an altar to a new God? Possibly his first. Certainly the first one to serve as resting place for his divine bum._

And the God found an utterly bizarre but humorous affection welling up in him for this old worn piece of marble all marred with cracks and streaked with water stains. A little dazed by the peculiarity of it all, the God paused by the mounting block, unseen; dropped a hand to it, felt the warmth of autumn sunshine in the stone. He could practically feel Iaon smile at the sensation. Except Iaon was nowhere near…

The God shivered, even inside the Cloak and out in that warm sun, as the effect ebbed. It was extremely odd, and—despite the pleasure that nearly anything connected with Iaon now brought him—he hoped it would hurry up and go the hell away. _If this starts interfering with the Work,_ he thought, uneasy, _if Iaon’s perceptions begin overlaying everything I see—_ It wasn’t as if those perceptions weren’t valuable to him. _But in their place. Without Iaon there to filter them, to focus and direct them, they’re just so much noise—_

The God stood gazing down at the stone with a scowl of discomfort, feeling oddly disloyal; as if disowning this side effect of his union with Iaon—for such it surely was—somehow amounted to disowning the man himself. _…Ridiculous. At any rate, so profound a physical and emotional connection between mortal and immortal might be expected to have some unexpected temporary side effects. Doubtless they’ll soon pass off._

He turned his attention to something else near the stone from which Iaon’s reaction had briefly distracted him. A scatter of dried stuff lay about the base of the mounting block; wrinkled blooms of fragile crimson anemone, the windstrewn petals lying about like splashes of bright blood; bunches of pallid blue-white butterfly hydrangea and strands of trailing white-flowered _kampanakia;_ dessicated stems of the first autumn narcissus and even some branches of laurel, the leaves still green. The hard ground elsewhere in the open space inside the gates, before the inner courts where the paving started, had none such—though there were occasional wisps of hay or beast-droppings from where cattle or swine had recently been driven through. _These were offerings,_ the God thought; _the sorts of flowers the butterfly likes, symbol of the mortal soul._ And the laurel suggested that some people felt about this spot as they might about the scene of an athlete’s victory, or the place where a hero had fallen. The God was obscurely pleased by this, essentially useless though the mortals’ sentiment might be. They could none of them value Iaon as he did: but at least they did value him.

At last he sighed and moved away, turning his mind back to business. Originally the God’s plan had been, after a brief reexamination of the City, to proceed straightway to the Palace and read the hearts of the Prince’s parents—with an eye to testing them against the (admittedly somewhat sparse) baseline he’d established for them while here in the semblance of the Lady Xanthe. After that he’d intended to hunt down the sister, wherever she was, and read her within an inch of her annoying life. Now, though, he was starting to feel that before he got into that, the exact parameters of this new shift in his perceptions needed closer evaluation as a matter of urgency.

It had been an hour or so past noon when the God first arrived at the City’s gates, and was now almost exactly two hours past. He left the mounting-block and spent the next two hours wandering the little City’s streets as he’d done on that first visit before ever laying eyes on his Prince, having now committed himself to a far more detailed survey than originally intended—looking more closely at the worn brick buildings and the people in the packed-dirt streets, peering more intently into open windows and mortal hearts. Silent as any shadow, invisible as a breeze, the God slipped in through open doors, or by the Cloak’s virtue passed through to the far side of closed ones. He gazed in sharp cool assessment at quarreling spouses and squalling babes and midday lovers snatching an hour’s pleasure in back rooms and upper rooms and alleyways; he deduced hidden rages and old festering heartbreaks and gall-bitter envies and secret spites, and with great care and precision read the hearts that hid them to check his results. These were always in very close agreement—the objects of his assessment being, after all, just mortals. And at all times he kept alert for the sense of that other silent regard that was suddenly walking the City’s streets with him.

By the afternoon’s end the God’s data-gathering had revealed that in many places—the insides of most City houses in particular—the “remote” Iaon’s response or recognition was completely absent. There were occasional spikes in the data, where the chill down his spine or the warmth in his chest told the God that Iaon knew (and hated, or liked) the interior of this nobleman’s house or that half-roofed shack of someone the God would have thought of as abysmally poor; but these were recognisable as anomalies. The outsides of buildings, public streets and squares, however, provoked the familiarity response much more frequently, and in varying degrees. The more public such places they were or the better Iaon would have had reason to know them, the more connoted and emphatic the associations became.

 _So it seems I need not be concerned about my deductions beyond these walls being affected by this phenomenon,_ the God decided at last. _My greatest care needs to be taken when evaluating his parents and sister, to keep artefact of Iaon’s experience from contaminating my results._ This he’d have done anyway. But finding that the proper pursuit of the Work wasn’t going to be interfered with was a tremendous relief.

And a further interesting phenomenon also presented itself to him as he made his way about the City. Normally most animals avoided the God, sensing the presence of a strange power wrapped in shadow, and perhaps also sensing something of his kinship to Death. But as the God went to and fro among the habitations of men within the City’s walls, he found himself increasingly being accosted by cats. From down little alleys or out of doorways or leaping down from low poor rooftops of the shanties built nearest the walls, the cats would come strolling or running toward him—mostly it was the younger ones who ran—and then paused nearby and carefully looked at where he stood, invisible though he was. Quite fearlessly they would come close enough to lean idly against his legs, laying confident tails up against him. Or they would get between his legs while he was trying to walk so he had to stand still to avoid being tripped; or even, in some cases, stand on their hind legs to arch their backs and rub against him.

Once this repeating event had progressed beyond coincidence, the God quickly reasoned it through and then paused by a worn brick wall between two houses, amused and willing to spare a little time for observation. Certainly there might be some feline affinity for shadow, but more to the point was the fact that cats hunted by scent as readily as by sight. The Shadowcloak could do nothing to hide his scent—and the God, to the cats, doubtless smelt of Iaon. Almost certainly the Cloak itself did too, as the Prince spent enough time inside it with the God when they were on the hunt. By way of confirming the deduction, the God slipped into one after another of the cats' bright fierce little minds and found in each the affectionate scent-memory, like a brushing of ashen gold across each consciousness, of a man who gave them milk when they were kittens, and stroked them with warm kind hands. The God, having himself been stroked by those same hands, had trouble controlling a small soft smile of agreement.

So it was that the Consulting God completed his investigations in the City unperceived by all other things mortal, but followed by a casual trail of felines, all looking carefully unconcerned and pretending to the best of their ability that the God was nothing all _that_ special—merely a diversion for a boring day or something to amuse themselves with until mealtime. The God was being equally casual, but was secretly much amused. Insofar as he was partial to any given class of beings as a whole, he was partial to cats. Their independence, their talents for stealth and cunning, their gifts as stalkers and hunters, their individualism and their pride, all struck a chord. Nor did they particularly _want_ anything from him… though he apparently interested them in what seemed a strictly taxonomic sense. It seemed that as far as cats were concerned, you were either predator or prey. They correctly classed him from his general look-and-feel as some kind of predator, recognized that they were not the prey, and were thereafter only interested in confirming themselves to him as distant kin.  <invisible-dark-secret-shadow-fierce- _clever_ >, said one of them to him—well, not _said_ as such; but that was its impression of him, and the God had to admit it was both perceptive and accurate, as far as it went.

So he suffered their continued attention as he made his way into the heart of the City, making for the Palace at last. _Since when have I ever been able to read animals this way?_ the God thought. _The idea wouldn’t even have occurred until…_

 _Until Iaon and that horse._ And the God had to smile again at the memory: _you could tell I’d been on a_ flying _horse just from the_ smell?—and the softness of Iaon’s hair against his fingers that first night as he plucked out the single downy blue-white feather sticking out from behind the Prince’s ear…

At last he reached the City’s little Temple of All Gods and paused, partly to watch a good number of his escort wander casually in to shake the priests down for excess food offerings or pick up missed scraps from around the altars. One final youngster, a tabby just old enough to have been tiny before Iaon went to his “death”, arched up against the God’s leg underneath the Shadowcloak and purred at him, and then scampered off into the Temple. The God smiled once more and turned toward the Palace.

It was as he and the Prince had left it, but also as the Prince remembered it: a place soaked in associations both glad and troubling. Here before the podium of the main building Iaon had bidden the Lady Xanthe goodbye with that quiet small smile that the God had seen again since. Here he’d said that terrible farewell to his father when he was small, and the God could still feel the heat of the young Iaon’s tears and the pain in his head that had ached him hours later, looking out his window and hearing the terrible quiet of a City where most of the men (and the one he loved best) were gone. And behind those experiences, which the two of them had shared directly, there were hundreds, thousands of others; glad, sad, neutral, experienced by day and night, conversational or silent, full of other people or quietly alone. In the God’s view the Palace flickered with a positively Heisenbergian uncertainty as it attempted to display the totality of emotional and associational states it had acquired over Iaon’s lifetime.

For a moment the God stood off to one side of the central space before the Palace, so as not to be run over by someone with a barrow or a donkey cart, and closed his eyes and marshalled his control. Though the associations were Iaon’s, the mind in which they manifested was the God’s, and over _that_ his mastery was close enough to absolute. _Quiet now,_ the God said to that part of himself—for so it was, for all that it felt like Iaon. And that was perhaps the way to manage this. _Quiet, my Prince: let me deduce._

Gradually the turmoil calmed, the imagery settling into the Palace as it was today—the afternoon sunshine slanting across the low portico and between the pillars that upheld it, everything settling golden and calm, like Iaon in a lazy mood. _There_ , the God thought. _Now._

He swept up the steps and paused just briefly by the great pillars on either side of the door and the broad polished threshold, the spot where an unescorted suppliant would settle while waiting for someone from the house to formally acknowledge him; then passed through the outer entry chamber, into the great hall with its mighty hearth, all clean and swept and empty of guests as yet, it still being early for such. Servants were puttering about, moving the benches in the hall before sweeping the main floor. The God looked them over cursorily, found that what he saw reinforced his earlier impressions. Iaon’s House took good care of its people whether slave or free—all well fed, well clothed, in good health—

And down the stairs from the gallery above came a woman in dark short-sleeved linen tunic and skirt with a dark-patterned overkilt about her hips, long salt-and-pepper hair bound up high at her neck; a woman with Iaon’s nose.

 _Mother!_ — In a breath’s time that storm of memory-uncertainties was wrapping itself around her as it had around the Palace. She was young and beautiful, she was this age and lovely and dignified, she was dressed in a Queen’s robes or in a smudgy pale shift all dirtied from the herb garden, her face was alight on seeing her husband come back through the great doors on his return from war or rigid with grief in their chamber as she tried to master herself for Iaon’s sake—

_Prince! If you please…_

The many-layered phantoms of memory fluttered, then stilled like gauzes in a wind suddenly fallen, and finally dropped away entirely. The God examined Queen Ianeira intently as she came down into the hall to move among the servants, speaking quietly to them, then moving to examine the long wooden tables one by one.

Quietly the God approached her, keeping pace with her a table’s width away as she stroked her hands over the wood of one, looking for places that needed sanding (for guests did stick their knives in even though they shouldn’t). _Phrygian stock,_ he thought. _Aging surprisingly well, physically active, ambidextrous..._ (The God had often noted Iaon’s habit of unpredictably changing hands while eating or doing some manual tasks around the House. _Interesting. So it came from her, then._ ) _...Rode a great deal in childhood, a broken shoulder in her late teenage years from one such ride gone wrong._ But the way she refused to favor the shoulder though it had never set right and always pained her was also Iaon to the bone. A quiet manner, but eyes that saw a great deal for a mortal; a spirit that kept its own counsel but was never satisfied that it knew enough about what was going on around it—entirely sensible for a woman who was mistress of a royal household. Steady, solid, for all that she was tall and fairly slender.

He drifted closer to Ianeira, looked into her face from quite close. Her eyes were the source of the brown that haunted Iaon’s in some lights, though the brown was lighter and shaded toward hazel; the wrinking around the eyes, the thin lips, were also hers. Those lips were a little pursed now, the eyes just a little narrowed in resigned annoyance, as she leaned over the table and ran her fingers over a gouge in the wood. _Who was sitting here? I bet it was Chrysaos. I_ swear, _that man was raised in a barn. Not that we don’t have evidence that that was the case…_

The God could have laughed, as much at the Queen’s expression as at her tone of thought. He knew that look—had indeed seen it often enough when the Prince was about to take him to task for some new indignity inflicted on the kitchen table. _But never mind that now…_

The Consulting God leaned close, and in the merest breath, so softly the Queen would wonder if she was actually hearing anything at all, whispered: “Iaon…”

She held quite still for that moment, her face partly turned toward him: and the God slipped into her heart.

***

—and it squeezed inside her at the sound, like something squeezing her lungs hard enough to briefly stop the breath there… the way it had caught last night when Dasi had murmured their son’s name in his sleep, in the depths of dream. Not that that caught her so much by surprise. Gods only knew that thoughts of him just kept coming to her all day, every day, as if out of nowhere… especially with his father so ill, bedfast now, and half as sick again with missing both his son’s company and the certainty of knowing the kingdom would be in Iaon’s hands when what would come to Dasi finally came.

But that was always the way, wasn’t it. You’d be so sure you could lose yourself for a while in the stress of the day’s business, or the evening’s rest when you were tired out, and desperate to be so, sometimes: but memory had no mercy. And her own dreams half the time were full of impossible things: finding him, holding him. _My son, my son!_ As she leaned there her arms were actually twitching with the physical desire to reach out to him wherever he was and pull him close and hug him. She had to lean hard on them so as to keep the shiver from showing.

Yet the ache of missing him was tempered by the knowledge of the word that had come to them from the oracle. _You’re alive, you’re all right, and you meant us to know you were, oh Iaon thank the Gods, thank them all!_ It was beyond all joys to know that, after the horror of the journey to the mountain and the grief that came after. But it wasn’t enough, truly, _never_ enough when your world had had one of its foundations removed, and you were always missing his steady solid ways and his sharp bright voice and his quick wits and his smile. How she missed the way he’d always had one ready for her—the wide mocking grin or the grave thoughtful _thank-you-for-reminding-me-again-what-royalty-should-do_ smile, or the exasperated one-side-of-his-face _oh-mother-please_ one, or the small sweet smile he saved for when he’d just turned away from her and he thought she couldn’t see it… but oh, she could: she simply never let on. Her heart simply _ached_ with the lack of him… And she took a long breath and worked to master herself. _Iaon, oh may you still be safe wherever you are, son, still safe and happy, may you be well, high Gods grant my son that, you_ know _he deserves it!_ And then a wave of exasperation. _But look at me standing here struck still like a statue, what will everyone think, stop being such an idiot! Straighten up, get moving, there’s work to do…_

She stroked that gouge in the table again, straightened, and said to one of the servants nearby, “Steithon, when Delas comes along with the pumice stone finally, have him deal with this spot first. Seriously, you wonder about these people sometimes. I bet they don’t treat their own furniture like this…”

***

The Queen moved away and the God simply watched her for a moment, amused to hear Iaon’s tone of voice coming out of her mouth. This reading matched well with his earlier one: and a heart less like that of the great Queen in Tiryns could hardly be imagined. Oh, she’d had her passions, that one, but they’d been all nastily wound up with her perception of her own desire and position and power, twisted into ugly things. _This_ woman’s heart was something else entirely.

As the God turned to make his way to his next assessment, the Queen stopped again further down the table, scowling at yet another ugly gouge. The scowl was Iaon’s too. Seeing it, amused again, uncharacteristically touched, the God paused… and then, on a whim, did something simply because it would please Iaon. He leaned close to the Queen again and whispered, even more softly than before, “He is well; he thinks of you.” No need to have read Iaon’s heart to know that: it was obvious. And then he slipped away.

The Queen held still again for just a moment. Then she straightened once more, looked around, and went calmly off toward the doors at the side of the hall, where a slave had just come in with a block of pumice.

 _What_ are _you making of me,_ the God thought, heading up the stairs to the chamber where he was sure the King now lay. _Sentiment, that was sheerest sentiment._

 _Mine, though,_ the phantom-Iaon seemed to answer him, without words. _Well spotted. And thank you._

The God went on. He knew the way quite well, having walked here in Iaon’s memory. The door to the royal chambers was shut: the God whispered a word to the Shadowcloak, and he was inside.

The outer chamber was empty, the hearth there cold: the weather was too warm as yet to need fires during the day. The door to the inner chamber was shut as well, but the God passed it as he had the other and stood quiet, just inside the doorway, regarding the King.

The room was large, the walls figured with paintings of birds and beasts. There was room for tall clothes presses and carven chests, and a work desk off to one side all scattered with parchments; there were three wide windows looking out onto the square before the palace, and a hearth on the inside wall. In the middle of the room was the large couch the royal couple shared, built and sloped rather like the God’s. On it lay King Dasosarchos, in a light linen tunic with a sheet over him, asleep.

The sleep was uneasy. His breaths got shallower and shallower over the course of a minute or so as the God stood silently watching. Then the King’s breathing seemed to pause, long enough to make a careless observer think he might not start breathing again at all. But after that he sucked in a huge gasp of air and began the whole process again.

Once again Iaon’s second-hand experience of the moment stirred and fluttered about the King’s prone form, and this time there was a far greater sense of pain about it… which the God could understand. The King was plainly suffering from a respiratory syndrome secondary to any one of a number of underlying disorders: one that would be fatal eventually without aggressive treatment. Certainly someone seemed to have been attempting such. The table nearest the couch was littered with bottles and flasks and a few small drinking-bowls with the remnants of wine-and-drug mixtures in them. The God bent over them, sniffed, catching the scents of aconite, wintergreen, foxglove, a few other herbs medicinal and otherwise.

 _These can do him little good,_ the God thought. Though he by no means had Iaon’s medical expertise (though he was unlikely ever to admit as much to the Prince), he was sure enough of that.

 _No, they can’t,_ said the somber voice of the something-inside-him-that-spoke-for-Iaon, and went quiet.

The God stood there gazing down at the sleeping, gasping man. If the Queen had given Iaon his eyes and his nose and his smile, then his father had given him the general cast of his face, the stern look the Prince wore in his more soldierly or disciplinary moods, the shape of his brow and the set of his jaw. _Pure Argos, that face. Far more so than Proetus’s. If they were assigning rule by how long one’s family had been rooted in a region,_ this _man would be reigning in Tiryns. …_ And this was where Iaon’s silver-and-gilt hair had come from, though this late in his life what gold remained to Dasosarchos had been reduced to a mere dusting, probably only visible in daylight like this. His body remained a taller version of his son’s, well knit, strong-shouldered, though long illness had pared it lean. Regardless, the shoulders and arms could almost have been the same, the musculature perfectly suited to its underlying bone structure. The hands were more wrinkled, differently and more heavily callused from much more and longer weapons use, but perfectly in scale to Iaon’s; smallish, deft, strong. _Another one who rode from a very early age,_ the God thought, looking the King over, seeing how his limbs were held even under the sheet, even in sleep. _And campaigning practically from childhood. Not because they made him do it: because he wanted to, more than anything._ A protector, a defender; and determined to be so from the very start, from when he was barely as tall as the swords he was trying to use.

The God moved to the couch, reached out, and very carefully and gently laid a hand on the King’s head. While reading the heart of a mortal in sleep was not impossible, as when one was in coma, it had its challenges. “Iaon…” he whispered once more, closed his eyes, and slipped into the King’s heart.

***

Instantly he was submerged in a murmuring confusion of blurred and confused imagery and whirls and twists of muted color, like memories whirling about in his palace of the mind before they were properly ordered and filed. _As I thought: dreaming,_ the God thought. _That’ll complicate matters._ _Less precise than reading a conscious subject, more variables introduced into the process._

 _Yet maybe this would work better, in a way._ In dream the God could do more than whisper a word or two to provoke the response he wanted to see. It would be as if he was stepping into the mortal’s—well, it wouldn’t be a mind palace, more of a mind hut or shanty actually, with hardly any structure; these people didn’t yet have much idea of how to order their inner spaces – and he could manipulate that interior environment as surely as he could his own. More: once inside, he’d be able to deduce directly from visual data that the mortal had acquired but would never have been able to process as fully as the God could. A little acting-the-part would be required of him, as there were certain ways dream-messengers were expected to behave… but that was part of the God’s stock in trade.

Eyes still closed, the God took himself into the foyer of his mind palace, let it settle about him: then turned to one of the doors in the lowest storey. There, past the moonlight and the darkness, he could see the swirl of colors moving inside the King’s mind, the blurry images and the sound of voices far away. Carefully he drew the Shadowcloak about him and passed through the doorway into the mortal’s dream.

Once through, it was as if he had hardly moved: for King Dasosarchos was dreaming of this room, though it was morning light coming in that window instead of the lower-slanting, more golden glow of afternoon. He was dressed in such workaday linens as working royalty might wear casually in warm weather: a tunic like Iaon’s favorite ones but in a deep warm brown instead of the natural creamy shade Iaon preferred, and a workaday deep-pleated linen kilt with sewn-on leather flanges, halfway to the _pteryges_ kilt a warrior might wear. The King was up off the couch and sitting on the windowsill, looking down into the square outside the palace, as if expectant. Someone (the context of the dream silently told the God) was coming, and not just a guest—someone he knew, someone he loved. In the shadows of the God’s mind, something stirred, a mixture of delight and nostalgic sorrow: Iaon’s reaction to seeing his father like this, younger, healthier, blended with regret at how the dream contrasted with the way he actually was.

“King Dasosarchos Ismenidês,” the God said quietly, “turn and look upon me: I bear a message for you.”

The King turned calmly enough to him, not at all startled; he seemed as ready to find the God there as whoever it was he’d been waiting for. He slipped off the windowsill, standing to greet his visitor. “Who are you, shadowy one?”

“I am a dream sent to you by the Gods, who see you from high Heaven; they’re concerned for you, and they pity your troubles.” It was straight out of Homer—the King would recognize the trope.

That bought the God a sharp look from those eyes, and though they were just a shade less blue and more grey than Iaon’s, it was his Prince looking out of them, the gaze’s calm pride a touch annoyed but still quite under control. “I ask for pity from neither God nor man,” said the King, “but any messenger of the Gods is welcome in my halls. Let me call for food and wine for you, divine one, and when you’ve eaten and drunk you shall tell me why you’ve come.” He moved a little toward the door.

The God held up a shadow-gloved hand to stop him. “I am only a dream, royal King, and eating and drinking are not in my remit,” he said, amused; this man was also plainly where Iaon came by his punctilious treatment of guests. But also, that ingrained dignity, that sense of command, even in a man who knew he was on what could well be his last sickbed: this was its source—the role-model for the strength that had borne Iaon up through that long walk to the Mountain. “I come to speak to you of your children.”

“My daughter—” The man’s face creased with worry. The God felt a strange irrational annoyance that it wasn’t Iaon’s name the King mentioned first. Nor did it matter that the presence at the back of his mind was shrugging it off. _She’s Crown Princess now, he has to put her first, he’s always got the kingdom on his mind…_

“Is she safe, lord?” said the King. “She went away to sacrifice for her brother—”

(—a whirl of imagery from the next level down in the dreaming mind, the Princess setting out on her journey, everyone in mourning to see her off, uncomfortable formality for everyone involved—Arete’s first formal duty as Crown Princess; how horrible that it had to be this. And in the back of the King’s mind more unhappy thoughts, greatly repressed and tangled with grief and anger and _shame_ at the anger—the thoughts made him miserable, the more so because he knew them to be true. _This shouldn’t be happening, should never have happened, oh my son, my son, where_ are _you, why are you not here instead of no one knows where on Earth or in Heaven or the Realms Below? Why are you not here doing what you were born to do, and how is it that not two seasons ago I was ready to go, knew that our land would be safe in your hands as it’s been safe all this while I’ve been sick, and now I must be in fear again, now I must know that nothing is as it should be, that our people are threatened and there’s nothing I can do. And instead of you we have—_ The image of the upright shape in her mourning clothes, half priestess, half princess, not comfortable in either role, holding onto her dignity as best she could, a kind of pitiful imitation or semblance of the dignity that came so naturally to her brother: plainly struggling with her own grief and wishing with all her heart that she was elsewhere. Followed by the shameful thought: _Would that she were. Would that she was back up in the mountains, running about happy with the family she_ cares _about, rather than here, trying so hard to be what she can’t. She’s never been quite what we thought she’d be, never quite what we wanted—_

The Consulting God winced a bit as the words and images flashed by, thought-swift but never too swift for _him._ And his own memory answered instantly, _Nothing like what we thought he might be, so strange, he could be dangerous, what do we do now?_ The child-God memories of what seemed ages ago weren’t anything like so thoroughly sealed into the deepest cellars of his Palace of the Mind for him not to still catch the occasional voice of some adult God to whom he wasn’t related, drifting down those empty corridors late at night. Mutters, whispers, words they thought he couldn’t hear (but of course he always could, or could deduce the words after the fact): _best avoided if you’re smart, no one knows how he does it, a little too much of old Chaos in that one, and anyway you heard what Apollo said when he heard, it’s not natural, he’s not safe, not normal, a freak…_

He felt Iaon’s presence very strongly, then, as if the Prince was leaning close. _You went away somewhere. No going away. Stay here, now. This is what you came for._

And as so often was the case, the Prince (or whatever of him might be indwelling within the God at the moment) was right… not that even to some immaterial, mysteriously internalized Iaon would he easily admit it _._ The God breathed out, refocused. _—and how should she necessarily be what we desired,_ the King was thinking, with regret, _when we never taught her how, when it was always going to be Iaon who did it? Did_ we _do this to her?_ And then a wave of the deepest sadness. _It’s true what the poet says: it’s the greatest mercy of the Gods that men are never told what_ might _have happened if they’d just done something else._ “She’ll be on her way back now,” the King was saying aloud, “she had trusty guards with her—no harm will have come to her, surely—”

“Surely,” the God said, instantly grateful for the easy out. “But as for your son, the Prince Iaon—”

Then the God winced even harder, and actually had to brace himself still to keep from wrapping his arms around his gut and bending double as if he’d been kicked. Where at the sound of the name the Queen had ached with longing all through her bones, the King on hearing it spoken was thrust hard through with a fierce harsh pain that pierced him like a sword; and the God, in the dream with him, had to suffer this as well. Strange, though, that after bearing the first brunt of the hurt, he found it easier. It took him a moment to realize that it was that odd new shadow of Iaon, there with him too, who knew what to do with the great pains of the heart, and how to bear them, bear up under them. Even though he wasn’t there, in some way Iaon’s shoulder was against the God’s and they were bracing each other, as they’d done in enough dark alleys before when gasping for air in mid-chase.

The King had now had so much practice dealing with this pain that he didn’t physically move at all. And he was mastering his heart now too, though with difficulty—for again he felt great shame, this time at being so stricken on his son’s behalf and not his daughter’s. He looked into the God’s shadows. “Is he well, deathless one?” the King said.

“He is,” said the God, “and he is safe.” _Safe enough for the moment, at least…_ “He is glad in his work, and does great deeds, and the Immortals honor him. Know this in your sleep, noble King; but speak not openly of it, lest ill befall him. Neither for God nor for man is there wisdom in tempting the Fates.”

“I hear you, divine one: let it be as you say.” But the King’s face was working with hope, with words he wanted to restrain and couldn’t, _wouldn’t,_ because this was a dream, wasn’t it, and what possible harm could come of it? “But tell me, if you may, why did the Gods when they took him from us first say he’d offended them? He’d never done any such thing. The Gods have always stood high in Iaon’s honor, and he loves them. Otherwise surely he would not be among them now.”

The God’s breath caught a little in pity and pain, both normally alien to him, both again secondary to the reactions of the shadow of Iaon that was helping him get through this. “The will of the Gods,” said their putative messenger after a moment, “is not easy to make plain to mortal men.” _Not least because the Gods are routinely unclear about just what it is!_ “But their hearts can be moved by courage, and by goodness. And in these regards, your son excels.”

Very slowly, the King smiled. “Immortal messenger,” he said, “there you're quite right.” He stepped forward and knelt before the God, straight-backed, on one knee, looking up into the shadows of his face; and the God glimpsed again in memory (and strangely, in the King’s) the banquet down in the great hall, and the Prince kneeling so, crowned, robed, smiling up at the Lady Xanthe’s semblance. Here, as there, in the man before him, was that quiet, solid, confident pride: but here the pride was in the son who’d knelt so. “I thank you for your message,” said the King. “Take him back word from us, if you may. Tell him we love him, and no matter where his road may take him, in Heaven or to Hell or through the realms between, we think of him always. Can you do that?”

The God bowed his head: he was both oddly moved and troubled, and wanted out of there. “I cannot say what I may or may not do,” he said, this line too being one of the old tropes: “it’s a bad thing to babble on and on like the wind that blows.” And he stepped backward, through the door and back into his palace of the mind again, fading out of the King’s dream.

***

Another step backwards and he stood in his proper person in the bedchamber once more, gazing down on the drawn sick man gasping in his sleep. There the God paused a moment, silent, before drawing the Shadowcloak more closely about him. He’d seen in the King’s dream the route Iaon’s sister would have taken through the countryside to Mount Aroania, and how she’d return. It was a matter of a few moments’ simple calculation to determine within a significant fraction of a stadion where she would be now.

 _Go,_ he said to the Cloak.

A second later he stood on a steep and wooded hillside in the hill country north of the Kingdom, hidden under the shade of a gigantic gnarled holm-oak all set about with spinneys of wild juniper and thickets of fragrant scrub thyme. Shadows stretched long down the hillside—the sun having dipped nearly below the neighbouring southwestward hillcrest—and the old road winding past the foot of the hill, hardly more than a stony track, was drowned in blue-tinged shadow.

The God gazed down from the tree-shaded dimness. Making their way along the road were several women in traveling clothes, dun- and dark-colored. Two were walking ahead, heads bent together, talking quietly; a third by herself paced along wearing a robe and overkilt and chlamys all in various shades of blue, all deep enough to be mistaken for mourning black at this distance. Two spearmen in bronze-and-leather armour led the way, and two more brought up the rear, leading a pack mule and a donkey with bound-on burdens—a rolled-up tent, various sacks and packages.

The God stayed quite still for a moment, waiting for the second opinion, the presence that had been with him all day… but it was silent; not exactly missing, but quiescent. _He knows this road: but perhaps doesn’t care about this particular part of it. And he knows these people… but still: no reaction._ _Unusual._ Perhaps the phenomenon had run its course for the day. Or maybe the intensity of the experience with Iaon’s mother and father had worn it out for now. That whole line of inquiry would need to be followed up at a later date, as he and Iaon explored together what this new thing between them meant and how it could be used to their advantage… or _if_ it could.

In the meantime, if the new addition to his inner life was offline at the moment, that was just as well. In this particular case the God would always have preferred space to deduce cleanly, and then to listen to the subject’s heart without interruption.

 _There,_ the God told the Shadowcloak, indicating a spot a little further up the road just to one side of where the track ran.

A breath later he was there, watching the little party come toward him in the fir-scented afternoon. First came the initial pair of spearmen looking serious and sternly dangerous (while both were actually supernally bored and only marginally alert). After them came the two waiting-women murmuring together in a respectful undertone (while by their gait and the way their robes were wrapped and in the case of one of them, the third rebraiding of her hair today, each fluently expressing her desperate determination never, _ever_ to do this again, no matter _how_ the Queen might beg, because being out in the wilds with the woman behind them and with nowhere to escape to was _not in their job descriptions_ ).

And then came the woman who walked by herself—weary, eyes mostly focused on the ground, glancing up only occasionally. She was nearly as tall as the Queen, robustly built, the dark hood of the chlamys drawn up to mostly hide her pale golden hair, all threaded through with silver. As she approached the God the road angled a little to the left, and the woman glanced up toward where it would curve yet further left around the foot of the hill.

The eyes. _Iaon,_ the God thought, in near-shock. It was so strange to see those sea-blue eyes in this face—for the lines in the face and the way Iaon’s sister moved and held her body spoke of a mind and a heart _completely_ different from Iaon’s. Harder, but not stronger: fiercer, but not warmer: bolder, but not more courageous; wilder, but blindly and thoughtlessly in love with danger where Iaon was thoughtfully in love with it.

Silently as she passed the Consulting God fell in with her, and simply went along with her for some paces, watching. So _strange to look at eyes like this without looking_ down _into them,_ the God thought. After a second the Princess’s gaze fell away from the road ahead, resting now on the ground ahead of her as she chose her steps with care. _Not because it’s rocky and uneven,_ the God knew immediately, _but because for many years she’s been a stranger to roads._ After all, it was the wild places Bacchantes roamed, routinely avoiding the haunts of men because Dionysus in his purest and most perilous forms would never come near those—

The God bent close as he walked beside her, close enough to breathe a whisper into her ear as he had with the Queen. “Arêtë Dasosarchëidë,” was all he said; and as her eyes slid sideways, looking for what she wasn’t sure she’d heard, the God met them and slipped into her heart.

***

— _Nothing, a trick of the wind. Or of my mind. Been enough of that, the last few days…_ Particularly the voice she kept hearing, now that she’d never hear it again this side of the Shades. _Had so many chances to hear it, and wasted them. Let him live his life and was so busy living mine, and sometimes even cursed the times when our two paths crossed. That was sin: I sinned against him. And now I’m punished. It’s only right._

Her eyes flicked up again to the hillside, and the old longing stabbed her as it had time after time on this journey. On untouched ground like the hillsides above them, she knew how to move, to run, would be as fleet as any deer. But down here on the road, hemmed in by the people around her and limited to their pace, she felt like a beast of burden, plodding—hauled along on the long rein, now, and no more able to escape than the pack beasts were. _Broken at last to harness,_ she thought, bitter. _All that time I thought I was free? Now we know where the truth is. Where it was always going to be._

She looked down the road again. A hundred or so stadia along, it would have finished its descent into the lowlands; and then there would be the fields, and the river, and the City, and the Palace. Mostly she hated the sight or thought of the place… yet there were times when the memory of it tugged at her so hard that she had to go apart from her sister devotees to crouch down and curl around herself and mourn for the Palace, as if _it_ was as dead as Iaon. Often enough she’d despised herself as a weakling for all the times she went back there in the winter to get a little respite from the cruel weather _—_ the snow, the mud, the chill to the bone that you could never get rid of out in the open, no matter how close you sat to the fire. Yet once inside the Palace the enforced closeness of it all, and the badly-hushed murmurs and the judging eyes of guests and visitors—those were as hard to bear as the cold outside. Always, everywhere she went in the Palace in winter, she was preceded and dogged by family expectations that she couldn’t fulfill and had never wanted to. _It’s not my fault!_ she wanted to shout sometimes, _I didn’t_ ask _to be born into this, if I had you’d have some right to be angry that I won’t do what you want—_ But she almost never shouted. It would have been hopeless. And it would have disappointed Iaon.

Worst of all for her at such times had been the way her little brother’s eyes rested on her—looking at her out of one of those faintly aggrieved faces he wore a lot of the time when she was around, one that always seemed to be saying mutely, _Why won’t you even talk to me any more? Why are we so far apart when we were so close? Can’t we get some of that back? …_ That she’d hated most of all. She’d always known that what had gone wrong between her and her parents had been entirely her doing. She wasn’t happy that they weren’t able to understand her reasons, but she was willing enough to take the blame. In latter years, though, she’d begun to suspect that whatever had happened between her and Iaon, that was her fault too. _That_ suspicion hurt, and she’d just started wondering how it might be put right. She’d started thinking about how to manage it… how she should put it, whenever she might be able to get him alone and just sit and _talk_ the way they used to talk when they were young, and find out what had happened, set things straight…

_Too late now._

She scrubbed at her eyes again, trying not to be obvious about it, hating the others’ attention on her. She wished she could just have come up here alone to take care of the sacrificial obligation. She was a Bacchante for all Gods’ sake, it wasn’t as if she couldn’t take care of herself alone out in the wilds. But no, suddenly she was Crown Princess, and so she had to do it the _proper_ way, with attendants and an escort. She hated the propriety, the bit and bridle of control. But there was nothing she could do about that now.

She hadn’t even seen him, the last time she was down, so many weeks ago. That suddenly-organized feast, yes, of course as soon as there was news of that she headed downcountry, especially when she was close enough. Feast times, with all the attendant confusion, were one of the few times she felt comfortable going back. Everybody’s focus was always so much on the important visitors, whoever they might be, that mostly the family left her alone if she didn’t create a ruckus—just pretended she wasn’t there, or looked away with that _Yes, there she is, don’t bother saying anything, you’ll set her off, just let her be_ expression.

And then, when she arrived, she’d found out what the feasting had been about… and was both amused and horrified. Some foreign girl of noble birth, and not just a passing visitor, either, but somebody Iaon had come across in the middle of nowhere and actually rescued not only from robbers but from a _bear._ How would anyone in her right mind, anyone who wanted to be romanced by a man anyway, ever be able to resist _that?_ Rescued by a handsome prince—and not just any handsome prince, either: _Iaon._ Even though when you tried to explain Iaon’s numerous attractions to him he always just laughed and rolled his eyes as if he thought you were joking, _she_ had no illusions about her brother’s looks. That smile, and those eyes: he had always been special, beautiful, even when he was a little skinny weed.

Her eyes burned, as they so often did now at the thought of Iaon when he was little… always falling down and scraping himself as he rushed around after her, trying to keep up, imagining that they were on great adventures. She tried to keep him out of trouble, because she did things, went places, that could be dangerous for a little boy. But he wouldn’t hear of it, couldn’t be kept out of her life, wouldn’t be left behind.

But that had been about to change. He’d have left _her_ behind, along with the robbers and the bear, as he moved off in a new direction with the dazzlingly beautiful woman he’d brought home. (And she’d heard more than enough about that after the fact from the courtiers and the servants, with too many sidelong glances at the princess whose looks even in her young day wouldn’t have been able to compete.) Arêtë would have returned to running around in pursuit of the failed adventure of her life—because seriously, when had she ever caught so much as a glimpse of Dionysus’s leopardskin?—and Iaon would finally have settled down for real. He would eventually have taken their father’s throne with a queen by his side who doubtless would have looked with scorn at the wild untamed irresponsible princess, the runaway, the one who didn’t care about duty, but ran off to serve the God of ecstasy and delirium.

The wash of anguish that had swept over Arêtë when she first realized what was going to happen still seemed so immediate. There’d have been no room for her at the Palace under such a woman once their mother died. Arêtë would have been shut out of the household and away from Iaon forever. (And the horrible unworthy thought had come to her that it was one thing to ignore him herself. It was another to be pushed out.) In the aftermath of the rescued lady’s guest-feast—or what remained of it, the second-night leftover buffet, because you couldn’t let all that roast meat go to waste—she’d spent a terrible night in her old chambers: terrible not just because of the couch, lumpy as always, but because they smelt of another woman, someone who had worn her clothes and lain in her bed _and would be taking her place._ The next morning Arêtë had fled back to the mountains without a word to her father and mother, and especially not to Iaon.

…But that was all over now. No foreign princesses. No royal wedding. Instead, something infinitely worse. _No Iaon... ever again._

And the tears slid down her face, and she pulled the chlamys further down to hide her tears from those who walked with her, and stood as straight as she could as she walked to hide how much she just wanted to bow herself down and weep again. _When will I be done with that?_ Will _I ever? Maybe not. Oh Iaon, I never had a chance to put things right with you, and now I never will! I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to you before you died, because I was somewhere else, somewhere besides where I should have been. Oh, what would I do, anything,_ anything _, to hold you one last time, to tell you I was sorry, to try to put it right! And now it can_ never _happen._

And then came the anger, the helpless, useless anger, one of those things Iaon had always understood because sometimes he got angry the same way, in a great fierce rush of rage. _Why would you do that to him, Gods? He was good! He was_ blameless! _He never did a thing that wasn’t to help someone else! What kind of idiots_ are _you?_ And she tilted her chin up in defiance and glared at the sky in fury. _I hate you all!_

***

The Princess walked on, her head erect now, her arms by her sides—working her hands in and out of fists a little, a sort of half-clench that came undone a second later.

The invisible shape walking beside her blinked at that. The God knew well that particular habit of Iaon’s—the thing he did when he was impatient but holding himself still, or trying to keep from saying (at the wrong moment) something he really felt strongly about, often to the point of rage. It made the God’s breath catch, threw him for a second or so off his stride.

She _did_ love her brother: there was no doubt possible on that count. And the grief, that too was real. Her suffering was intense, a scalding thing. As he had been right about his parents, Iaon had been right about his sister. _But then he_ is _a heart—didn’t you say as much yourself? Trust him to read them well._ Yet the God couldn’t help but distrust a heart so torn, so divided. In her depths the woman was as furious with Iaon as she was foundering in grief for him.

And there were unacceptable levels of uncertainty involved in his analysis, which he _hated_. What the God might deduce from concrete signs and physical evidence would of course be accurate. But what he read from a mortal’s heart was, when one came right down to it, the mere frozen image of a moment. Those drives and emotions were there at this moment in time, yes… but mortals were so _changeable._ And the God trusted Arêtë no further than he trusted any mortal who wasn’t Iaon. _Yes, she does love him. But among her kind that vicious motivator is still rarely more venomous than when exercised at the family level…_

He looked at her narrowly as they paced along, as late afternoon started deepening into the shadows that came with sunset. _I made no promises to anyone about how I might or might not affect_ her _mind,_ the God thought, already seeing one possible remedy for this situation. _Iaon’s kin she may be, but she is not Iaon._ It would be easy enough to slip into her mind, reshape her memory: leave her too frightened of the fate that was supposed to have befallen her brother to want anything further to do with him, even if Iaon went ahead with his plan to bring her to the House. Or—another possibility—the God could simply install a slow memory leak in the Princess’s mind that would gradually sap the pain from her soul, leaving her content with matters as they were—faintly sorrowful, but otherwise untroubled by her brother’s loss. _It was a kindness,_ he could hear himself saying to Iaon. _She was suffering. You said so yourself. I’ve dealt with her in such a way that now she suffers no more._

Yet he could just see the look Iaon would turn on him when he heard that, and could just hear what he’d say. Even though it was quite a logical and sensible solution to Arêtë’s problems, Iaon wouldn’t like it at _all._ He’d without doubt feel strongly that indulging his and his sister’s sentiment in tandem, sorting them through together, was the right way to proceed. And while the God didn’t give a half-drachma damn about the sister’s closure, he certainly did about Iaon’s. _This matters greatly to him. Is it so hard to give him this, when he so desires it?_

The God sighed, and scowled. There was yet another complication, brought up for consideration by his perception of what was going on inside Iaon’s sister: his own, all right, admit it, _jealousy_ , of a connection to Iaon that was older than his. _Not deeper._ Never _deeper. Not_ possible, _ever._ But it was unquestionably more settled, ingrained over decades. That connection had suddenly made its nature plain to the God with that little gesture, the fist-clenching; and there was no ignoring the data. This woman was rooted deep in Iaon’s life, as was the love of her. _Try to pull the roots up and who knew what damage might be done? To Iaon… or what the two of us have, what lies between us._

 _But she’s in his past, now. There’s no more place for her in the life he’s chosen, his life with_ me. _He has to see that._

_Of course he’ll see it._

_So… let it be as he says._

The God moved a little ahead and turned in a swirl of cloak for one last glance at the strangeness of eyes so like Iaon’s in the Princess’s face. He shivered unaccountably as their glance slid past him, looking through him as Iaon’s eyes would never do.

Silently the God stepped off the road. Quietly the party went by: the waiting-women (one of them was in for a surprise in about three weeks, to judge from the whites of her eyes: he hoped Queen Ianaeira was understanding about unexpected maternity leave for her staff), and then Arêtë (a last glimpse of the sea-blue eyes as their gaze fell to the stones of the road again), and the next two spearmen (their boredom still quite settled, though one of them would have much less reason to be bored when everyone got home and the shorter of the two waiting-women fingered him as the reason she was going to need the leave.). And then came the mule on its long leading-rein, and finally the donkey, on a longer rein (it had been biting the mule) and hung about with bags and sacks.

The God was about to turn away when he observed the donkey’s nostrils flaring as it passed. Its head swung around toward him, and something moved in the depths of its eyes: an expression not only of startlement, but recognition.

The God stared, nonplussed.

The Donkey flicked an ear at him, its nostrils flaring again; and the way it rolled its eyes at him made clear that its gifts for self-expression were at least as developed as those of the cats, though its idiom was much different. Not in so many words, but clearly enough, it said to the God: <Thank you _so much._ I owe you one. >

Then it too went ambling on up the path as the sun sank further behind the hills ahead.

Astonished, the God stared after it: then smiled slightly among his shadows. A breath later he was gone.

***

Iaon was in the kitchen making tea when he heard footsteps coming up the seventeen stairs. Within a few moments the God was hanging up the Shadowcloak on its hook behind the landing door, exchanging a look with that one red eye. This promptly closed itself as if to say, _I’ve had more than enough for one day, thanks. You’re on your own._

“Nice day out?”

There was a long pause suggesting that the God considered this a matter for further analysis. “Mmm,” the God said, heading back toward the Chamber to get out of his clothes. Minutes later he wandered back into the kitchen, where Iaon was waiting for him with a steaming cup. The God took it from him and sipped, while Iaon leaned against one of the counters, gazing at him thoughtfully.

“I know where you were.”

The head inside those shadows tipped a bit to one side as the God leaned against the opposite counter, and the regard within them dwelt on him with interest. “Do you indeed.”

Iaon drank some tea, then rolled his eyes. “Please. I tell you I want to see my sister, and the next day you ‘go out for some air’ without so much as a text from Dolios or needing some weird ingredient for an experiment? How much deduction do you think _that_ needs? I do have a grip of at least _some_ of your methods.”

The God sighed.

“So how did it go?”

“Well enough.”

“So you’re seriously unnerved, then.”

The God sagged back against the counter and didn’t answer straightway.

Iaon sighed too. He was beginning to regret ever having raised this issue to begin with, and had already flirted with the concept of telling the God to forget all about it. Yet he knew the God wouldn’t, and neither would he. The issue had to be dealt with; what Iaon had seen would prey on his mind more powerfully with every passing day until it was dealt with.

“You had your soak…” the God said after a moment.

“Smelled that, did you. Yes.” He smiled a bit, for the absolutely decadent pleasure of that bathtub was something he wouldn’t get tired of at all soon. “Dozed off while I was in there again, would you believe it? Had the funniest dream about being in the Palace. My Mum was going on about furniture. And Lord Chrysaos…”

He trailed off, for the God was looking at him oddly out of his shadows. “What?” Iaon said.

“What else do you remember from that dream?”

Iaon frowned. “I don’t know, it was all kind of… Wait. Was it something about my father? He was waiting for Arêtë.”

“Yes,” the God said.

Iaon looked at him in confusion. _“How?”_

The God shook his head, frowned, turned away.

“Are you all right?” Iaon said after a moment, stepping over to slip an arm around him. “You seem… I don’t know. A bit rattled.”

“I’m fine,” the God said, pulling away.

Iaon had to work hard to control the look that wanted to leap onto his face at that. “Well,” Iaon said a moment later, looking down into his tea. “It was Arêtë you went to deduce. Or to read her heart. How is she?”

“I’m sure I can't say.”

Iaon found the phrasing interesting. He cocked an eye up at the God, who pushed away from the counter and wandered out of the kitchen into the sitting room, where he paused to look out the right-hand window.

“It’s not my assessment of her that truly matters here, Iaon,” the God said. “It’s yours. Your heart must be the one to judge hers. And in the management of hearts, especially those of your family, I defer to you.” And the God’s smile could be felt through his shadows, as usual… but Iaon’s insides clenched at the slight sad edge he felt there, the troubled heart inside the darkness. _I make this concession to you because giving you your desire makes me glad,_ it said, _but nonetheless, I’m afraid._

So was Iaon, increasingly, for reasons he couldn’t understand. But then of all the kinds of pain he disliked, the discomfort that came with disagreement among family had always been the worst. Since he was very small, he’d always believed that family should be one at heart, one in mind and purpose. Fights, disagreement, never failed to drive him right up the walls. And that was what he saw coming. Inevitably, after the initial relief of discovering he was alive, Iaon knew Arêtë was going to demand that he come home. Then he would have to—

 _Stop second-guessing myself,_ Iaon thought, and let out a long breath of final decision. “We’ll have her brought, then,” as he went into the sitting room after the God.

“You will,” the God said.

There was a little pause.

“I can’t be here when she is, Iaon. Something—something might happen.”

Distressed as Iaon was by the thought of anything that would force the God out of his own house, the unnerving concept of “something happening” had occurred to him independently. The idea of his sister—very likely even under the best imaginable conditions scared and angry—meeting the God at a time when he, too, was on edge or in a bad mood, was unnerving enough. The further thought of what the God’s sharp tongue could do to Arêtë if he took the safety off had made Iaon’s hair stand on end more than once. “I suppose that might be wisest,” he said, as gently as he could.

“But this I’ll require of her,” the God said, “and the House will see to the details of it. Your status here is still in question, and no mortal carelessness can be allowed to threaten your safety. She may visit you here, but once she’s left, she won’t be able to speak to any other being of what she’s seen or done.”

Iaon considered that, nodded. “That seems fair.”

“Nor will she be able to communicate her experience in any other manner—writing or gesture or tapestry-weaving or interpretive dance for all I care. Make sure she understands that, Iaon. I don’t want you blaming me for some after-the-fact overreaction on her part.”

“Believe me,” Iaon said, “I’ve seen enough of Arêtë’s overreactions in the past without you ever being anywhere near her. I’ll see she knows the score.”

The God nodded. “When, then?”

Iaon had been mulling over that issue more or less from the moment the God had gone out. “She’ll be sacrificing again,” he said. “Normally this kind of thing’s done in threes. Probably within a tenday or so.”

“Very well. You can have Westie keep an eye on the feed from that part of the world. He’ll let you know when your sister leaves to go up the Mountain again—”

And the lighting in the room around them changed as the sitting-room air started filling up with glowing white text.

The God turned to read it, and Iaon could feel interest begin stirring inside those shadows. “Iaon—!”

“Case?”

The God's voice went low and rich with rapidly growing amusement. “It appears Argeiphontês has a diplomatic connection with a rather thorny problem.”

“Oh? Kidnapped royalty again? Lost vital documents?”

“No. The berries on a great tree outside the walls of Babylon have suddenly and mysteriously changed colour.”

Iaon put his eyebrows up. _“Berries?_ Seems a bit botanical for your tastes. Not to mention boring. Last case with a tree in it was barely a three...”

“What have I told you about theorizing without sufficient data, my Prince? On this peculiar change of hue first being noted, the tree was found to have the bodies of a young man and a young woman lying beneath it.”

“Uh oh. Star-crossed lovers?” Iaon said, already feeling sorry for them.

“So it would seem,” the God said, reading swiftly down to the bottom of the text, his grin growing wider. "Both stabbed."

“Not another suicide pact...” Iaon shook his head sorrowfully.

“Oh, no, Iaon,” the God said, actually rubbing his hands together. “That's doubtless what the poor befuddled authorities think. But this? _This_ is double murder by proxy. Now all we have to do... is go _prove_ it!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes and links for this chapter are [here ](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/47378233516/chapter-25-notes-and-links)at [the Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com)
> 
> Many thanks to the excellent Ivyblossom for the sweetest-natured beta work to be found Above or Below or in the Realms Between.


	26. Of The Mystery of Pyramus and Thisbe and a Shadow in the Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Consulting God is called in by the Gods of Babylon to investigate the strange occurrences surrounding the death of two lovers; while Prince Iaon, stumbling into his own “locked room" mystery in the God’s Palace of Thought, finds something he was never, _ever_ intended to see…
> 
> _Warnings for references to physical abuse and dysfunctional families, police brutality and battlefield suicide; and for failed elopements, stains that won’t come out, atypical pain management strategies, cats of the Big varietal (fortunately uninvolved in crime), and very peculiar compliments._

Babylon the Great, Babylon the beautiful: everyone had heard of it, distant and fabulous, a rich and storied place that a man of the Greeklands might only hope to win to by a weary half-year’s journey through perilous lands. Now, just a few breaths after being swept out of the House’s garden inside the Shadowcloak’s folds, Iaon stood in the bright hot light of mid-morning, swordgirt in breastplate and armored _pteryges_ kilt, before tremendous metal-inlaid gates and vast golden-brick walls that enclosed tens of thousands of square stadia of city and that towering central ziggurat of which poets sang. He’d wondered, before they came, if having lived on Olympus a while might have jaded him to such sights. But it was _mortals_ who’d built this, and he found he could do little but stand there and shake his head and breathe out in wonder. “Babylon,” he whispered, shaking his head, and grinned. _“Amazing.”_

Beside him, a tall straight shadow in the blazing day, the Consulting God resettled the Cloak about him and yawned. “Dull,” he said. _“And_ the welcoming committee’s late. Can’t think why they bothered making us wait _twelve whole hours_ if they can’t be bothered to be on time now…”

Iaon rolled his eyes at the complaints, which had started up almost instantly last night when the God had been told that immediate response wasn’t on in this particular case. They were going extramural—meaning into another pantheon’s turf—and various political and procedural niceties had to be observed. “Just settle down,” he said, without any real hope that this would happen. “Hermes did say it might take a while to get this sorted out. When even he describes the paperwork as ‘complicated’…”

 _“Politics,”_ the God hissed, with animus that seemed unusual even for him.

Iaon sighed and went back to examining those mighty walls with an expert’s eye. A stadion or so off to one side, the Avenue of Processions, lined with mighty enameled-brick statues of lions and griffins and various local mythical beasts, ran past and onward to that single pair of great gates, which had scaffolding leaned up on either side of it at the moment, half concealing great mosaics and bas-reliefs. That was the only entry visible on this side of the city. Right around the rest of the half-circle that sheltered this half of Babylon and the river that divided it, there was nothing to be seen but solid hundred-foot-high wall, indomitable-looking and sheer. “Nasty nut to crack, this,” Iaon murmured. “You’d need a lot of machinery…”

“Oh, people who admire this real estate sufficiently will bring that along in time,” the God said in complete unconcern, gazing about him. “Have done already, once or twice. The only thing that changes is the technology. And finally climate change will finish the job when everything men attempted could not. Ah, Argeiphontês, _finally_ —”

Hermes was suddenly standing there beside them in what Iaon had learned to think of as his “away” uniform, not so different from Iaon’s. It lacked the breastplate, though—Dolios was wearing just a plain light shortsleeved tunic with the kilt belted over it—and had the long sickle-shaped bronze blade that had killed Argus hanging at his belt, while the caduceus was braced over his shoulder as usual with its snakes on full alert status, gazing around them with interest.

Next to him stood a figure a head taller than either Hermes or the Consulting God: hook-nosed and massively bearded, broad-shouldered, bull-brawny, bare-chested except for a crimson baldric blazing with golden cuneiform lettering, and otherwise wearing only high-laced golden sandals and a fiercely bright kilt of crimson and gold. Hanging from the baldric and stuck through his belt was a jagged sawtoothed blade that flickered and sizzled as if with bound lightnings. “Investigator,” he said to Hermes as Argeiphontês saluted him with a brief inclination of his head. “Consultant, and Consultant’s Colleague—thank you for making the time.”

Iaon, having fallen into parade rest beside the God when he realized they were no longer alone, knew a sky-god-turned-head-of-pantheon when he saw one, and gave this one an acknowledging nod a touch more prolonged than what he would give Hermes when on business in front of strangers. The God, though, merely raised his eyebrows, looking lazy and unconcerned. “Lord Marduk,” he said. “I take it the little gene-splicing experiment with the Mushussu sorted out your Anzu problems, finally? Congratulations. If you’d have called me in on that one, though, I could have saved you a deal of trouble.” And he produced one of those facile flashing grins that Iaon had long since learned were nothing more than the acceptable face of the God’s disdain.

The Babylonian God looked in astonishment at Iaon’s companion, and Hermes just stood there and didn’t try to hide a smile. “You did warn me,” Marduk said.

“Yes I did,” Argeiphontês said.

Marduk laughed. His voice was far deeper than the God’s, and rougher; when he laughed, Iaon half thought they should all feel the earth shaking around them. “So how did you know?”

“I didn’t know,” the God said, “I _observed_. Particularly, I observed that this whole plain right down to the riverbank is _not_ reduced to a wasteland of charcoal and ash, meaning that you solved the depredations being inflicted on you by the Goddess Tiamat’s latest dragon-child by building yourself a better dragon.” He wheeled, pointing toward the walls, his shadows swirling around him. “The claw marks of which, secondary to their battle, I can see perfectly well in the walls—in those spots where the brick-pointers haven’t yet got around to finishing the patching, and even where they have: the new stucco’s a shade or so off—” He whirled again in place, now pointing toward the scaffolding to one side of the bronzebound doors nearby— “and whose image I can see perfectly well in the mosaic reconstruction going on on the Ishtar Gate. Eagle-like kicking claws on the rear, for more leverage and muscle power; big-cat claws on the front, for catching and holding: greatly increased firebreathing ability, enabling the Mushussu to burn out the other dragon’s throat, and most specifically its own incendiaries, in the earliest stages of the fight.” The God shrugged, his shadows settling around him again, his shoulders dropping into an abbreviated version of the slump that Iaon knew meant _boring!_ “Obvious.”

Marduk stood there shaking his head. “The half was not told to me,” he said to Hermes.

“Just as well, maybe,” Argeiphontês said in that gravelly drawl he used when he was intent on controlling his own amusement.

“So this is all quite charming,” the Consulting God said, “but I have some other matters in hand at the moment, so let’s get this cleared up for you, shall we?”

“Fine. The two youngsters —”

“Tell us nothing for the moment,” the God said. “You can fill in anything I miss. Which won’t be much. This unusual tree is…?”

“This way,” Marduk said, waving a hand eastward. “We’ve preserved the scene for you, as Hermes requested. I thought you’d prefer to approach from the townland side to avoid muddling the ground any further.”

“Perspicacious,” the God said, and swept off in the direction Marduk had indicated.

Iaon went after him, with the other two Gods bringing up the rear. The sun was certainly hot here: enough so that he was already beginning to wish he’d brought his good helmet, or even the casual pigskin one with the boar’s-tooth applique, to keep the sun off his noddle. You could almost feel it like a pressure on your head. _Perfect weather for heat exhaustion,_ Iaon thought, risking no more than a glance up toward where the sun swam in that hot brazen sky. _Well, doubt he’ll take very long over this. He won’t care for these conditions much more than I do…_

For a space so close to the gates of a great city, the fields immediately outside Babylon were surprisingly barren of anything but broad expanses of a pale tough grass—the only shallow-rooted growth that could cope with the aridity of the region’s long dry summers—and the nearest of the canals that moved water from the Euphrates to the lesser cities nearest the capital and the great stretches of cropland that began fifteen or twenty stadia away. The soldierly parts of Iaon approved: the more open ground you had around your city, and the less overgrown terrain for an enemy to hide in, the better. But the princely parts found it a bit strange that there were no outlying buildings at all, not so much as a shed or a shepherd’s hut.

Naturally even his own small Kingdom forbade such, but people were always pushing the boundaries, literally as well as figuratively. Space inside the city walls was precious, and the inhabitants were always looking for some way to hive off storage outside it, willing for the sake of the increased convenience to take the risk of losing some of their possessions if there was a sudden attack of brigands or if the Crown got cranky and impounded everything for breaking the rules. _But not a sign of that here…_ And Iaon found this increasingly disturbing as he made his way along in the God’s wake. _Whoever makes the laws here, people are too afraid of them to even_ try _breaking them._

And the physical reality before him spoke of penalties far more severe than anything Iaon would have enjoyed enforcing. Yes, Iaon knew this was supposed to be the part of the world where—at least in mortal history—the whole concept of the rule of Law had been invented. But now he found himself remembering something someone had said to him over a campfire, God only knew how many years ago now: “the further East you go, the cheaper life gets.” At the time he’d said _Really? And who knows what the people to our westward think of_ us? _Seems like kind of a sweeping generalization to me._ Now, though, he was wondering.

Ahead of him the God was making for the tree, which (even for Iaon) wouldn’t have taken much finding. It was the tallest thing to be seen outside the gates for many stadia on this side of the city, no more than a stadion or so off to one side of the Ishtar Gate.

And there, in the shade under the tree’s branches, even from this distance Iaon could make out two lumpy forms against the ground, each covered over with some kind of white sheet or shroud. Further away, just past the shadow of the tree’s outermost branches, lay an even whiter patch of something lying against the pale sundried grass. That grass, Iaon noted, gradually got greener as it got closer to the tree. _Water._ And sure enough, just at the edge of the tree’s shadow on the open-country side, there was a shiver of light: a pool, almost certainly a spring, since Iaon could see no sign of any stream reaching from elsewhere toward it. Iaon’s thought went instantly back to the spring in the woods near his home, the nymph’s spring by the road, under its shading trees. An odd rare pang of homesickness struck him then, along with an unexpected hot flush of excitement and satisfaction at the memory of the strange noise he’d heard down the road that one day, and what had come of hearing it. Slowly he smiled at the thought, and kept on following the Consulting God.

The God paused suddenly on his way toward the tree, looked down oddly as if he’d been about to stumble on something. Then on he went again. He gazed around him keenly as he went, and once or twice he paused to glance down at the ground, then continued, steadily working his way toward the tree, half bent over sometimes. Once he dropped to his knees, holding an arm out behind him to keep the others from approaching any more closely. Iaon held still, as Argeiphontês and Marduk behind him were doing, but still quirked half a smile in amusement at something he’d seen many times before: the God acting more the hunting-hound than the deity, smell and every other sense stretched to their uttermost, taking in everything around him, and the God muttering under his breath in intense concentration as he classified what data his senses brought him. Very faintly Iaon could hear him: “one, no, two sets of imprints there, just enough difference in the moisture, nighttime, yes, but how long—”

“Good question,” Iaon said under his breath, “how bloody _long?”_ Because, gods, the _sun_ : it really was starting to feel like a hot rock sitting on Iaon’s head, though naturally none of the deities in the neighborhood even noticed it. That sense of hot pressure was getting worse by the moment, and Iaon started wishing even harder that he’d brought that little pigskin-and-boartooth cap: anything to put a little distance between him and the tyrannous weight of the sunlight. _Had no time to drink any extra water this morning, wish I’d thought of that before I left—_

And the buzzing. _Where’s that coming from?_ He was starting to hear it now, as they all got closer to the tree. _Beehive up there, maybe? Or in the trunk. Wouldn’t be surprised._ Living as long with beekeepers of one kind or another as Iaon had, it was funny to have to remind yourself that bees didn’t always live in straw skeps or little white wooden houses. He shook his head and watched the God casting back and forth across the open ground, bending suddenly to touch it, kneeling briefly to dig his fingers into the turf; then straightening to look away from the tree and the walls entirely, back the way they’d come—

“—two sets of tracks, but why so far apart, judging by the grass the pressure all along them was equal from end to end, how does that even _happen_ , no cart could produce such a track regardless of humidity or the resistance of the grass—yes, turf elasticity would have increased with increased overnight humidity and dew, but moisture at the root would seem to indicate—” The God kept on muttering intently while the sound of the buzzing seemed to scale up and up, and all the while he spared the noise’s source nary a glance. “Yes, well enough, these other transient markings extant show appropriate pressure differentials between heel and toe sections of the prints. So equal pressure on the initial long straight tracks can’t possibly be attributed to nighttime relative humidity changes…” And he was on his feet again, this time plunging straight past the tree in the direction of the city walls.

As Iaon passed the tree the buzzing was getting louder. _Definitely bees,_ he thought. _And the bodies are right under there. Wonderful. Better keep a sharp eye out for him when he’s done with whatever he’s on about right now, and we go that way…_ Iaon sighed, because being under that shade, bees or no bees, would be preferable to being out in this increasingly ferocious heat. He ran a hand through his hair, shocked to feel how hot it was. His head was actually starting to ache now.

Ahead of him Iaon heard a hard-indrawn breath of excitement, of realization: a sound he’d have known anywhere, no matter how loudly any wild bees were buzzing. _Though they’re loud enough._ Ahead the God had stopped still, and Iaon held a hand out behind him as the God had done before. Behind him Hermes Argeiphontês and Marduk paused once more. In the the next breath the God was staring down and around him in a whirl of shadow as if looking for something that had been dropped. “Yes. _Yes!_ So not cart tracks then, not the issue at _all_ , just a question of working out the timing now—”

The buzzing was louder still, and between the heat and the noise Iaon was actually starting to feel as if he was itching. _Like that time out with the expeditionary force when we were marching and that swarm of locusts came along—_ He paused a moment and spent that breath’s worth of time adjusting his swordbelt, as if it needed adjusting, meanwhile trying to keep listening to the God while also getting the weird confluence of sensations under control. The Consulting God hadn’t even got anywhere near the crime scene proper, as far as Iaon could tell, but the excitement in the God’s voice was building nonetheless. “—But that’ll come later, stay on the main trail for the moment, there’s better game afoot, oh _far_ better than I dreamed, just let them think for the moment that I believe the _obvious_ scene is what really matters. Does that idiot Marduk seriously believe I wouldn’t see what’s going on here? Or is he trying to get one up on Argeiphontês somehow? Ridiculous attempt, no one gets to do that but _me._ Never mind, play the game, let the data flow at best speed and we’ll get the gaps filled in while the fool thinks we’re footling around with the less important evidence—”

Iaon raised his eyebrows a little at that. _He sounds like he’s really sure they can’t hear him… or doesn’t care._ But then the God’s courtesy, such as it was, did sometimes slip below even its normal edgy baseline if he felt put out enough, on either his own part or Iaon’s. No telling which it might be at the moment.

Then the God was off again, heading past the tree and circling around the far side of it, the city-wall side. Iaon shook himself and his swordbelt back into order and continued after the God as if that small adjustment had been all that was going on with him. But as Iaon went, as he kept trying to master the increasing discomforts of heat and pressure and itch, _that_ was when he first noticed that somehow or other the God’s mutterings weren’t getting any softer, even though he was still walking away and should by rights be almost out of earshot, if not entirely so. _Now_ what _the—_

The God slipped under the tree and into the shade. Iaon went in after him, aware of Hermes and Marduk coming along behind him at a careful distance. He was glad of it, because his own physical discomfort was really starting to become difficult to deal with. _What_ is _this? Sunstroke? Prickly heat? Hives?_ But Iaon had had all of these over one long summer march or another, and what he was suffering now didn’t feel like any of them. His mind went back again to the locust storm, to the darkening of the air around him and his men, the sharp stinging little impacts all over face and arms and body, with nowhere to escape from the disturbing dark inimical life that was beating at them all around. And under it all, that buzzing. Iaon stared up into the tree’s branches as he came under them. _No bees._ Yet the sound of them was unquestionably here, somehow wound into the feeling of the strange invisible impacts all over Iaon, like a shadowy background. He shivered and set his teeth against showing any sign of the sensations assaulting him, and concentrated on following the Consulting God.

The God was making his way further under the great canopy of branches. Like many well-grown mulberry trees, this huge old one had a number of scrub and seedling trees that had sprung up near the main trunk from dropped berries, all struggling up for light. Near the thickest spinney of these, on the city side of the moss-greened, softer ground not far from the spring, lay something that had been previously concealed by the angle from which Iaon had been viewing it: a wide white slab of marble, twice as long and twice as broad as a man was tall, sunk into the ground. On it, in the sticklike symbols the Babylonians used and in Aeolian Greek, was carved the word NINUS. And some cubits away from the slab, to one side, lay the two pale shrouds that Iaon had spotted earlier. One was closer to the spinney, one much further out, almost to the edge of the canopy of overshadowing branches. And there too, marking the third point of a triangle, was the smaller pale object Iaon had seen lying on the ground: a drift of something small and white, nearly out into the blaze of the sun at the far edge of the crime scene.

The God simply stood still for the moment,looking around him and then up into the branches where many tiny flashes of crimson now showed amid the movements of the leaves. Then he gazed for some long moments down at the white marble slab, scattered with many white berries and a few new red ones, while Lord Marduk and Argeiphontês quietly came up to join them. “Ninus,” Iaon said, both to distract himself from what was going on inside his head and to give the God time to do whatever analysis he might be doing. “Who’s he, then?”

“The King that was,” Marduk said. “Died earlier this year. The Queen was his consort for nearly forty years.”

Iaon had to raise his eyebrows at that. “A little strange to plant him outside the walls, isn’t it?” he said. “Usually a ruler gets a nice big mausoleum in the city so it’s easier for your people to come along and offer for your soul’s peace.”

“Well,” Marduk said, and Iaon noticed that his expression was suddenly much more guarded.

“But then there was a little uncertainty about the tomb’s occupant, wasn’t there?” the God said. “Particularly about the circumstances in which he got there. Still unresolved…”

The God didn’t sound particularly concerned about this: rather abstracted, in fact, his eyes still seeming to rest almost idly on the stone. But the remark won an uneasy look from Marduk, and an equally uneasy one from Hermes, though Iaon got the feeling the unease was for differing reasons.

The Consulting God made no sign that he noticed this, though. He turned his back on Iaon and the two Gods and stepped well away from the tombstone to examine the ground on the fieldward side, a good distance from the places where the bodies lay.

Iaon gritted his teeth as the ache in his head immediately increased, and with it the sense of being barraged from all sides by a storm of tiny impacts. It was almost as if he’d stumbled into the target area of a battalion of slingers using tiny pellets instead of stones big enough to kill. And each of those impacts, simultaneously with its sting of pain, briefly darkened Iaon’s vision with some image of the moment, seen from an impossible angle and pictured far more brightly and clearly than he ever could have seen it. Or else he found himself seeing flashes of similar images from some other time, each one seen small and precise, in other lights and against other backgrounds, as if stored for reference and brought out now for comparison. Footprints in turf, in dirt, in mud, large, small, broad, narrow, barefoot and in a hundred different kinds of shoes and sandals, went flickering before Iaon’s view one after another at impossible speed until one matched what was being seen in the green-shadowed light under the tree. That matching image flared briefly bright with its companion as all the others vanished. Then instantly another mad episode of flickering comparison began, none taking more than an eyeblink. And all the while the strangely dry, evaluating voice kept on wringing the sense out of them—

“—First set of footprints. A woman’s. Shod, light, unhurried. Numerous passages forward to the edge of the tree’s shadow on the city side, and back again. Then sudden panic, the last set of prints driven deeper. Crossed over by one, no, two new pairs. One heavier. And then the third one joined by a fourth. Signs of a struggle, brief. Prints driven very deep. Over these an attempt to scrape them over and conceal the first two sets of prints. Complicated by water, poured or splashed on, not once but twice, spatter patterns differing, spatter angle point of inception / coincidence thirty-three degrees with rebound between fifty and fifty-five degrees and sixty-five degrees respectively from two different directions, marks of soaked-in water still visible in grass and lower leaves, one source taller than the other one source broader shouldered to judge by stance both armoured the heavier man carrying less armour two cubits high minimum to judge by the foot size also less mud adhering to these sandals as the taller moves away—“

The ideas and images kept on being slung at Iaon like an unremitting hail of the pellet ammunition he’d been imagining. Through the assault, the God’s words came faster and faster—far more quickly than the God ever spoke aloud, even at his swiftest-spoken. And there was something about the words that came across as mechanically as the noises from Mrs. Hudson’s clepsydra downstairs: all the words stripped of any tone or feeling, every word more chilly and clipped than they ever sounded when the God was speaking. It was almost painful to hear, especially when you were used to hearing the bare facts wrapped in personality, however acerbic. _If ‘hear’ is even the right word,_ Iaon thought, blinking as he tried to sort his vision back into some kind of order, clenching his jaw against the increasing discomfort he was suffering.

Iaon understood it now. The two of them had been close enough. Now, in these most recent days, they were far closer… and there were apparently side effects. _If he’s been able to step across my threshold… looks like now, at least sometimes, I can step across his._ He therefore hadn’t been hearing the God actually speaking aloud at all. What Iaon was now feeling and hearing as words was the business and pressure of the inside of the God’s mind, the part of him that gathered, arranged and analyzed all the physical evidence of a case, the mere physical quiddity of the scene of a crime. And he was perceiving the God’s interior mental experience, not through the kindly filter normally interposed between it and Iaon for the mortal’s comfort—should he wander from their Chamber into the anteroom of his lover’s Palace of Thought—but as the God himself perceived it, unmitigated, untempered. With every passing moment the experience was getting worse, the impacts more stinging, swarming thicker, a sleetstorm of tiny torments that never stopped—

 _This is what it’s like inside his head more or less all the time,_ Iaon thought as he blinked his way through the pain. O _h, my poor dear God!_ An endless rush of jagged fragments of data—images, numbers, scraps and tatters of fact—all driven about relentlessly on the winds of that ferocious intellect, a storm of information in never-ending motion as the God concentrated on picking out of the howling maelstrom of available fact the one thing he needs, the single word or image, sorting it into just its perfect place in a theory. And the building structure was always at risk of being disrupted by the sheer volume of data, its inherent distraction. _No wonder he gets frustrated, angry, worn down so often,_ the Prince thought. _I knew what I was helping him quiet down but I never guessed what it was like on the_ inside, _not from what he’s ever let me see…_

The God finished looking over the ground and prepared to examine the bodies, moving with his usual thoughtless grace as he avoided the older prints. Once again the rattle and pain-flash of incoming data scaled up inside Iaon, and he set himself as best he could to bear it as the God made his way to the bigger of the two bodies, paused, reached down and pulled away its shroud.

It was the young man, auburn-haired, tall, brawny, with broad well-shaped features that would have been considered handsome by anyone’s standards. He was dressed in what passed in Babylon for simple working-class clothing—a rectangular full-body wrap of light linen, embroidered at all the hems with bold geometrical patterning, tied shut at the top of one shoulder and with a sewn-on tape at the waist, and coming down to about shin length. The wrap was a pale wheat-straw colour, marred by a great brown bloom of blood down its front, as were the insteps of his high-laced sandals. A bronze sword lay nearby to one side, bloodied down half its length.

— _angle position fluid spatter inconsistent upward thrust…_ the God’s passionless inner voice began, and rattled on through sentence after swift sentence of observations on the placement and shape of the bloodstains. The chill of that dry, analytical inner regard was getting worse by the moment, getting down into Iaon’s bones, as the God settled into the meat of his deduction. It felt as if something of that bone-dry attitude was trying to get into his thoughts, too, trying to strip all the warmth out of them as something unnecessary, unwanted, a disability, a disadvantage. Iaon settled into parade rest again and straightened his stance, tilted his head up and set his jaw firm against letting anything get at his heart and interfere with its workings, for those were (he was sure) what made him most of use to the God when they were on-case together.

“Iaon?”

“Uh, yes?” The God had turned his head to look at him now.

“The wound?”

“Sorry, yes, of course.” As Iaon went to him it occurred to him that the God was being unusually terse, almost as if he didn’t care for his deductions to be anticipated by anyone listening. _He wouldn’t care if Argeiphontês heard, though. In fact he loves showing off for him. Therefore it’s something to do with Marduk. All right…_

Iaon knelt down by the young man’s body, looked at how the blood had settled livid in his side, the underside of his bent legs. With some difficulty Iaon rolled him over far enough to undo the side-tape of the wrap and expose the wound. Immediately he noticed that the angle was upward, and shallow, and the edges of the wound very straight and cleanly sliced indeed. Iaon glanced over at the sword that lay nearby, a very old blunt bronze thing that looked like it had been hanging on someone’s wall for a long time and had been hastily pressed into service. A second glance told him that the sword was narrower than the widest part of the wound.

He glanced over at the God, who had crouched down beside him and was looking closely at the young man’s hands, then taking each of them in his own to inspect the fingers, particularly the fingertips. Iaon meanwhile rested his left hand’s thumb and forefinger at either end of the stab wound, glanced sidewise at the sword, then back again, and simply shook his head slightly. The God gave him the slightest nod.

But then on a sudden impulse Iaon reached out with his free hand and touched the God’s wrist: slipped a couple of fingers around it, as if to take his pulse. “Threshold?” Iaon murmured.

The light of the brazen day outside the mulberry tree’s shade was so bright that even here under its branches Iaon could see, through the God’s veiling shadow, his eyes widening a little. He nodded.

 _And one other thing,_ Iaon said without opening his mouth, the way he might have done were the God once more “looking over his shoulder” in a physically intimate moment. _People who want to stab themselves with a sword, and don’t have anything to brace against—they don’t usually do it standing. They tend to kneel._ Gods only knew he’d seen enough of that in the wake of any number of battles, among the many vanquished soldiers who’d chosen to take their own lives rather than throw down their swords and be made first captives and then slaves. From the wound—too sharply angled upward, Iaon thought, for someone who hadn’t elected to brace the sword on the ground and fall on it—Iaon then glanced at the young man’s sandals. _So if he was kneeling, why’s there blood on the tops of his shoes? And if he wasn’t kneeling, why did he fall this way, on his side, with his legs stretched right out?_

Through the shadow Iaon could just see the God’s eyes narrow and his lips curl up in the kind of wolfish pleasure that told Iaon he’d independently confirmed some part of the God’s deduction. _Quite,_ the God said. _Did they die when we've been told?_

Iaon considered. _Well, rigor takes half a day to set in hard, then a day and a half to start to pass: two, as a rule, before it's completely gone._ He reached out again, manipulated the young man's right arm gently. _Beginning to let go now. So... the middle of not last night, but the night before. Or very close to that._

 _Very well._ Aloud the God said, “Let’s move on.”

They rose together and made their way to the second body, and the God bent down once more to pull the second shroud aside. The young woman had fallen more sprawled forward than her lover had. Iaon gently turned her over as well, though doing so was troublesome because of the rigor.

She was very much in what Iaon understood to be the Babylonian type—honey-skinned, the hair bound under her casual turban-scarf a shining deep brown, her face long and oval with high cheekbones and a long proud nose. She wore the same kind of shin-length body wrap as the young man, but hers was more lustrous, a linen and silk blend in a pale watery blue, more tightly wrapped around her waist; under it she wore a tight-fitted white muslin undergarment that covered her upper arms, shoulders and breasts. At least, some of it was still white. Right under her breastbone, between those lovely maidenly breasts, a sharp sword had driven in deep, yanked out again. In its wake, the blood had leapt out and away as energetically as from any warrior’s heart and soaked all down her wrap.

Iaon let out a sad and angry breath. The God next to him, having noted that her little braided-leather shoes too had blood on the tops of them and down between her toes, then looked at both of her hands and at her fingertips as he’d done with the young man’s, and finally bent to brush a finger along her lips. After that he moved to get up again.

“No, wait,” Iaon murmured, because there was something not quite right about the flesh tones of her upper body—something darker than the pallor should have been. He undid the side tape of the young woman’s wrap and peeled it back; then undid as well the two tapes that held the upper undergarment tight around her chest.

All the skin down her ribcage and about her flanks and hips was blotched with ugly bruises, some broad as slaps, some smaller and more oval. Some were new and livid blue; others were greener, older. Iaon glanced at the God, scowling.

Then he had to wince at the renewed gust and sting of the whirl of information in the God’s mind and the even swifter flow of his interior dialogue, chill and dry as any desert wind in winter, the imageries of endless other stab wounds and bloodstains and bruises and rigor samples becoming moment by moment more intolerable as the added data gave the God an exponentially greater number of directions in which to extrapolate. Iaon pushed himself to his feet and couldn’t help but sway a little, this time at the addition of something that had been missing before: a strange feedback of his anger at whoever had been beating this poor girl.

Back Iaon went to the young man, knelt down beside him and started doing what he was now furious with himself for not doing earlier: turning him over to check his back. He was angry enough that it took a moment for him to register a darkness crouching beside him again, and shadow-gloved hands helping him turn the rigored body for better viewing. Sure enough, there they were, the dark wheals and marks that meant blows with rods and with a knout of rope.

 _“Damn_ it,” Iaon said as the cold fierce impacts of the God’s interior storm of fact pelted against him in an even fiercer wind, as the new data added itself into the equation. For the moment, though, he was bothered a bit less by it than he had been before noticing the bruising. His own fury, slowly growing, was competing admirably.

And once again he felt that odd echo or reflection of his own feelings tangled in among the God’s process. “Can you bear it?” said the God, very low.

Iaon simply nodded.

“Just one more thing to look at here, then,” the God said, his voice sounding a bit more edged than usual.

“And one more outside. You were quite interested in the ground on the other side of the tree, between here and the road…”

Through the shadow, those silver eyes glinted with brief sharp pleasure even through the tang of unease. “My Prince, your observation improves day by day.”

“I’d say you don’t know the half of it on that count,” Iaon said, and smiled, though the smile was dry and pained. “Come on.”

To Iaon’s surprise, he felt the God’s near hand slip under his elbow, out of sight of Hermes and Marduk, helping boost him up. Then the God hurried off toward that third piece of evidence under the tree.

Iaon took a second to master himself, and went after him. The God was just standing still, eyeing what lay on the ground as if memorizing the way it had fallen. Iaon came up beside him and looked down at it. It was a veil, white, diaphanous… or so it had been before something had stained it with blood.

The God reached down to the veil, lifted it in his hands, eyed it narrowly: then spread it out to look at the rips and tears in it.

“Interesting,” he said.

“So’s that,” Iaon said, his eyes still on the ground.

“What—” The God looked down too. There, about three-quarters perfect in a bit of harder ground that didn’t quite lie under the tree’s shadow this time of day, was a deep-pressed footprint… but not that of a man.

The God dropped to one knee to run his fingers across it. A big central pad, and four toe prints well splayed out from the center. _(--Moisture soil composition clays dehydration daytime evening relative humidity sunlight exposure approximate mass—)_

Iaon rubbed his forehead, wincing again, then dropped one hand to rest lightly on the God’s shoulder, just touching the side of his neck. _Lion,_ he said in across-the-threshold mode, peering down.

 _Running,_ the God said.

 _Well, just_ finishing _running, actually._ Now Iaon was feeling grateful for all that time the Kingdom’s chief huntsman had spent trying to shove his wisdom whole into the young Prince’s head. _Look at the way the weight distributes along the toes. They’re digging in at the backs, not kicking off forward. It was thirsty, probably, and coming down here for a drink; but nervous at being so close to the city._

 _Likely enough,_ the God said. _And isn’t it interesting how this wound up right on top of it?_ He waved the ripped veil. _As if someone wanted to make very sure we found the footprint?_

“Mmm,” Iaon said aloud. His head was pounding, for the God’s deductive process was speeding up again. “Can we finish up?”

“Let’s.”

As the God got up again, Argeiphontês and Marduk were now heading toward them in a purposeful way that suggested that Marduk at least was more than ready to hear some deductions. The God casually dropped the veil back on top of the footprint before they got too close. “If you gentledeities would wait here,” the God said, in a voice that suggested he might throw a strop if they didn’t, “I require my colleague’s opinion on one last matter.”

“This won’t take but a moment,” Iaon said, hoping this was true. “Would you excuse us?” And in unison he and the God turned their backs on the divine Investigator and the head of the Babylonian pantheon and walked off.

They quickly left the tree behind. Iaon reached out casually to tug at the God’s sleeve, brushing his wrist as he did. _The gods in this neck of the woods,_ he said, _I take it they can’t do the reading-the-mortal’s-heart thing?_

 _Strangely enough,_ the God said, _no._

_Might be why the local laws are so severe?_

_A theory worth investigating. But we’ve other business first._

Together they made their way out across the pale dry grass to the area where the God had first paused. “Feel this?” the God said, dropping again to one knee, brushing his hand across the dry turf.

“They can’t hear us here?”

“Marduk can’t. Argeiphontês might but I wouldn’t care if he did because he _still_ hasn’t a clue what’s happening. It’s like the tortoise all over again.”

Iaon smiled at the near-affectionate gibe. “Fine. Yes, I feel it.” He lifted his hand, rubbed the fingers together. “Beeswax. No way I’d miss that, these days. …But something else too. Feels more tacky.”

“Resin,” the God said. Aware that they were being watched from beneath the mulberry tree, the God didn’t gesture, just turned his head to look off to their right. Iaon followed his gaze and could just make out a long faint impression in the short dry grass, spear-straight, with the very faintest gloss about it that caught the sunlight. “Normally there would be chalk mixed in with it too, but someone was eager not to have the lines seen.”

Iaon’s eyes widened. “It’s not some cart or wheelbarrow that made this, then.”

“Much too regular, much too even for that. These markings were made with _harpai_ , Iaon. Surveyors’ ropes, snapped against the ground. Someone has marked out three sets of measurements, with the trunk of the tree marking one corner of the outermost rectangle. That one measures one hundred one point eight _pous_ by two hundred twenty-eight. The middle one—”

Iaon frowned: the _pous_ was a foot, but that meant different things in different places. “Whose _pous_ are we using? Attic?”

The God waved away the question as if it was annoying as a fly. “Don’t be obtuse, Iaon, _Olympic,_ of course, what else would a God use? —The central rectangle’s fifty point five _pous_ by eighty-one point two five—”

“Will you slow _down!_ ’Point five’ is a half?”

“Yes, yes, _do_ keep up, Iaon, I’d prefer to do all this kind of work in decimal but it’s not your culture’s fault it’s a little early for that, all the same we really have to start doing something about your numeracy skills. Then the smallest rectangle is just twenty-five point two five _pous_ by forty-two point one, and it’s a bit off center, it makes no _sense_ when the centering on the second one’s perfect in relation to the outer rectangle, did someone slip or is it some kind of clerical error or—”

The God went on ranting. Iaon held still and worked on imagining the nested rectangles, nudged the innermost one a little off center in his mind…

And suddenly he was sitting with Miki on the steps of the Palace again—a thinner, tanner Miki of fifteen years ago—while the new young High Priest of All Gods drew with a stick of charcoal on the flagstones and laid out the basic ratios for him. _“Always the same, Iaon. Some say the Gods laid it down this way, some say it’s something to do with the way plants grow…but I think it’s just a human thing, myself. We like these proportions, and if no one knows why, who cares? It works...”_

All he could do was smile. “One to one and two-thirds by two to three and a quarter by four to nine?” Iaon said softly.

The God whirled on him. _“What?”_

 _“Peristasis, naos, adyton_ ,” Iaon said, pointing around him at where each of the building’s precincts would go. “Of course the actual proportions have to be finer… you only really use common fractions for the rough estimates. After that you need to go over to radians and percentages of _phi_ for the foundation measurements, otherwise the whole thing’s likely to fall down at the first good earthquake.” He rubbed his face, suddenly assailed by too many memories. “There’s also this thing called the Golden Mean involved, but I could never wrap my brains around that, way too many square roots and ratios. And there’s a formula for the number of the columns, and a square-root-of-five rectangle rule for the front portico of the temple, and this intercolumniation thing, all so bloody complicated—”

“A _temple?”_

Iaon nodded. “We finally had the money to build one some years back, but we didn’t have enough to afford an architect. So we built it ourselves. My friend Miki the priest of All Gods went on a trip for half a year to look at examples, and then we sent away for plans. They’re pretty generic…”

“A _temple!”_ the God breathed.

“Big one, too,” Iaon said, glancing down the outermost surveying line again and imagining what the long side of it would look like. “Somebody must be trying to set some kind of record.”

“And _not_ just a tomb. But— Ohh. _Ohh!”_ And then the God shot to his feet and put his steepled hands against his lips and simply held still for a moment. _Two_ moments. _Three..._

In the abstract, Iaon suspected that he was busy getting the last few vital pieces of fact and deduction to snug into place, and the best thing to do now was hold still and not distract him. Yet that final burst of silent reasoning also meant that the battering at Iaon’s mind began again in earnest, and started to become genuinely unbearable. He began to think that though the God might be able to handle this, there were apparently some things that mortals just weren’t built to easily cope with, and this was one of them. These physical side effects were a cry of desperation from flesh filled with blood rather than ichor. A _nd did I just make it worse for myself by pulling that little threshold stunt? I am genuinely an idiot._

_But I’m doing no one any good like this. And he may be like this for some minutes yet. Got to try to handle this somehow, even if it’s just temporary…_

Wincing, Iaon closed his eyes. There was a method he’d stumbled across some years back that sometimes helped him deal with the pain of his shoulder or his leg for short periods when he had to. It had involved, instead of trying to resist the pain, willingly submerging oneself into it. The method tended not to work for long. It required considerable will and persistence, and the state tended to keep slipping; pain, after all, being the body’s way of telling you something was wrong, and resisting such messages for very long was not a survival characteristic. But it could buy him a few minutes of respite in a crisis, and the present situation seemed to qualify.

So Iaon held still and did his best to let that dark swirl of discomfort in, invite it closer, embrace it. Peculiarly, it resisted him at first. Then, quite suddenly, it gave in. Iaon slipped into the darkness and was briefly deafened again by the buzz and sting of it. _Normal, sometimes you get a resurgence of what’s been bothering you, have to do it again._ He opened himself out to it, breathed out, let go—

Suddenly, silence, freedom from the pain. He was in a dark place, but not the usual one.

 _Huh,_ Iaon thought. _This is some over-the-threshold thing again, I bet._ He didn’t move, just stood there in the dark assessing. Everything was quite still for the moment, quite empty.

Except… not _really_ empty. Iaon could clearly feel that there was something even darker down at the bottom of this place: the way he had sometimes, on a search-and-grab mission, entered a dark room and known beyond rational knowledge that someone was concealed inside.

 _Well, no real surprise there,_ Iaon thought. _This is the_ God, _after all. Shadows are always going to be all over the place around him, inside and out._ Yet even as he thought that, he heard a low slow growl floating up from the depths… and the hair stood up on the back of his neck.

Danger: the very essence of it, somehow. And fear: something fearsome. Something in chains, too: for as Iaon stood still and listened he could hear the fetters move and clink. Whatever lay concealed down here was chained down tight, but it was constantly straining at the chains, with an endless low growl of frustrated rage thrumming all around it. Iaon understood immediately that this wasn’t any real thing, but—like the buzzing, stinging darkness that came with the God’s deductive process—a symbol for something, a piece of data. A secret. A _perilous_ secret, for all the dead still air around him was singing with subdued alarm. This was something inescapable, something that lay waiting its chance, something that no one must be allowed to know about _—_

Iaon’s forearms were alive with gooseflesh now and his fingers were itching for his gun. Yet at the same time this darkness fascinated him: all the more so because the secret it concealed was something that even the God seemed to fear and loathe, it being so tightly restrained down in this— _where_ was it? Not a real place. A corner of the God’s mind, possibly well buried down deep in what he called his Palace of Thought, in some room where he didn’t go often. Some danger the God himself feared…

 _And yet here I am,_ Iaon thought, and smiled half a grim smile. _No news there. Well, if something frightens him, it’s my business to help guard him from it. Even if he doesn’t want me near it. That bloody pride of his, making him think he has to do everything by himself; when will he learn…?_

And Iaon made to move deeper into the darkness, toward the thing in chains. But even as he did, the sheer force of what was now going on inside the God’s mind peaked unexpectedly, breaking the quiet state and buffeting Iaon back and away like the wind of one of those darkly destructive funnel clouds that one sometimes saw by land or sea. Seconds after that, the sharp sound of the God clapping his hands together in triumph popped Iaon’s eyes wide open.

 _“Yes!”_ the God cried, exuberant, and seized him by the shoulders and whirled him around. “Iaon, your brain is a precious coffer stuffed full of wondrous irrelevancies, you are the legendary midden one falls into and comes up covered with jewels; you are a _treasure!”_

“Wait just a minute,” Iaon said, rubbing his head again, but relieved to feel the storm of the God’s deduction quieting down for the moment. Another annoyance was taking its place now, though. He wasn’t at all sure about the kind of compliment that involved comparing him to a heap of shit. “If the information’s been all that useful to you, then it wasn’t irrelevant.”

“Yes, but the wonder is that you’d _keep_ all this garbage in your mind on the off chance that it might become relevant. Never mind, today it paid off! Come along, my Iaon, what are you standing there goggling for? Let’s go give Hermes the result he’s been waiting for and make him look spectacular in front of his rival.”

The God was heading back toward the mulberry tree at best speed. Iaon caught up with him. “Just let me get this straight. All of this is because someone was surveying for a temple?”

“Not all of this, Iaon, but certainly the _foundation_ of it…” The God grinned inside his shadows.

“Is that you trying to distract me with puns? Save your breath. Seriously, you’re a _god,_ how can you not know anything about the basic structure of a _temple?”_

“I may have known once. Possibly I deleted it.”

“But a _temple!_ When you’re a God and you have to deal with your worshippers—”

“Iaon, you can pretty much shut up now,” the God growled. Nonetheless, the growl was good-humored.

In the shade by the fallen veil, Marduk and Argeiphontes were waiting for them, Marduk with a distinct look of impatience. “Well, Consultant—”

Hermes said nothing, but gave the God a look that clearly said, _All right, gimme. And you’d better make this good._

“Well, Lord Marduk,” said the God, not even slightly with any air that could have been considered placatory, “we can start dealing first with the _real_ reason you brought me here. Which actually has relatively little to do with these two unfortunate mortals—”

“Whose _names_ are Pyramus and Thisbe,” Hermes said in a warning tone.

“Yes, Argeiphontes, thank you for your input, because that was the only solid data left wanting. It only remains to hear what you were told by those who found the bodies before we can move on to matters of far more import.”

Marduk was frowning. “Some of the Queen’s guard found them,” he said, “two hours after midnight last night. The guards patrol regularly outside the walls at night, keeping an eye on the Avenue of Processions and the canal accesses that run to the river.”

Iaon said nothing and kept his face still, but enough of the God’s methods had sunk into his head by this time for him to think immediately, _We’re a pretty good distance from the road here. What would the guards be doing all the way over here so late at night?_

“And what did they say about what they found?”

“They say they found the girl just before she died,” said Marduk. “She wasn’t able to tell them much. Something about a lioness coming to the spring just after she arrived. She ran off, and when she worked up enough courage to come back, she found her boyfriend there stabbed. She was shattered. It looked like he’d done it because she wasn’t there when they were supposed to meet. So she grabbed his sword and killed herself.” Marduk shook his head. “After she died they looked around and saw the veil and put the rest of it together. When she ran away from the lion, she’d dropped her veil. The lioness had apparently come down for a drink after making a kill, found her veil afterwards and played around with it a bit—ripped it up before she wandered off. Then the boyfriend came along, found the veil and assumed the lion had come across the girl, killed her and carried her off. He kills himself—then she comes back to keep their rendezvous and finds him dead out here. She picks up his sword… stabs herself.”

The God stood there for a moment and then whirled around again, turning his back on Marduk and stalking away. “They ‘put the rest of it together,’” he said over his shoulder, his voice rich with incredulous disdain. “You weren’t fool enough to believe any of it, I assume. Oh, _please_ say you weren’t!”

Marduk’s brow went thunderous. “It seemed likely enough. What we don’t understand—”

“Is anything whatsoever,” the God said, much amused. “And there’s only one problem with your guardsmen’s theory: it’s a fabrication from beginning to end. To begin with, have you even _looked_ at the veil? No, sorry, not your job, of course.” He bent to pick it up: held it up, spread it wide. “But even you can surely see—“

Marduk stared at him blankly. The God’s exasperation got the better of him all at once. “No, you can’t, can you? For pity’s sake—” He waved it practically under Marduk’s nose. “If the lioness drank from the spring after her kill, then why are the stains on the veil so vivid? The blood’s actually _crusted.”_

“But if it didn’t drink—”

“Drink, didn’t drink, it doesn’t signify in the _slightest_ because no lion’s been anywhere _near_ this veil,” the God said. “First of all, that single pawprint’s nearly a week old. Nothing to do with this crime scene at all, or the footprints that are all over it. And ‘tore it up,’ did she? Look at the edges of the tears.” He spread one of them taut between his hands to display the edges. “See how sharp and precise they are? No beast tore this veil, Lord Marduk! These are cuts made with a sword. And not that one either,” the God said, waving a hand at the bronze one lying near the bodies. “Good enough for piercing, that, but too blunt to have made these slices. The boy was no warrior, and the weapon’s an antique pulled off someone’s wall.”

“But what were they even doing out here, my God?” Iaon said.

“The place is well known as a trysting place, Consultant’s Colleague,” Marduk said. “Lovers have been coming out here for clandestine meetings for many years.”

“Must not be very easy to do that at night, though,” Iaon said. “Surely the city gates shut at sunset.”

Marduk shrugged. “Of course. But doubtless some come out during daylight hours, stay out, then come back the next day and no one’s the wiser.”

“Still.” Iaon shook his head, looked over at the God. “They must have been really desperate. Why else would they arrange a tryst out where lions are known to come prowling?” Not that Iaon didn’t know at least one possible reason. He knew what opening the God wanted to be given, and he was only too happy to help.

“That’s a fair question, Prince,” the God said. “And another one is why, when they accidentally met up with the Queen’s guards, the guards _killed them.”_

Marduk looked shocked _._

The God tossed the veil away in annoyance. “The story of their ‘suicide’ is a whole-cloth lie, intended to save the guards’ own sorry hides. _Murder_ was done here. These two were young and stupid, but innocent of anything else but sneaking away for a peaceful snog in the dark, something they couldn’t have done at home. Or, much more likely, they were sneaking away to work up their nerve for a departure more permanent. Not that that would have mattered to the guards who were moving around out there in the dark, not with torches—the youngsters might have seen those and run away—but with dark lanterns that wouldn’t betray their presence to any watcher from the walls: because they were escorting the surveying crew who had been sent out to do vital measurements. And by night, in absolute secrecy. Now why on Earth would _that_ be?”

Marduk was regarding the God with an expression Iaon couldn’t parse. “Someone,” the God said, “had told those guards that no matter what, if anyone should see the surveyors or the guard party with them, they were to be either taken or killed without fail. And so, in the dark, the surveyors went about their business.”

“But not entirely in the dark,” Iaon said. “There was a waning moon. Two hours after midnight, it would have been fairly high, and still pretty bright.”

“Exactly so,” the God said. “Even without the chalk added to the marking mix for the ropes, the surveyors would have been able to see the shine of the beeswax on the grass by the moonlight; and of course they had theodolites to work with, and maps for any landmarks they couldn’t make out by night. So out they came from the city, in secret, and the surveyors started their work… right there.” He pointed at the tree. “At that point, only Thisbe had arrived at the meeting place. She had been walking back and forth for a while, anxious. She walked right into one of the guards. Probably she screamed, thinking she was being attacked by some brigand or outlaw. Her scream brought Pyramus on the run, only a little late. The guards, realizing they had a situation on their hands, seized him too. They realized he was armed, and had no idea that he barely knew what to do with a sword or that it was a relic barely sharp enough to even punch through silk pointwise. There was a struggle. The guards were terrified that there might be more screaming, more _anything_ that would betray their position and leave all of them with their heads stuck on pikes in the morning for incompetence—because how much trouble can it be for ten of the Queen’s Guard to overpower a maiden and her boyfriend? So—” The God shrugged. “They killed these two and then set about constructing the coverup.”

The God turned to look at the bodies. “You’ll find as we finish looking into this that at least two of the guard party’s swords will match the stab wounds perfectly, which the bronze antique over there doesn’t: a point they were too panicked to consider, or just didn’t care about because they assumed somebody in-house would be investigating the murder, and could be influenced to ignore evidence… if it was even noticed. And there’s other evidence they also missed that helps lead us more closely to the truth.”

The God paused by Thisbe. “For one thing, the bruises on the bodies. Thisbe received the last beating of her life within the last twenty-four hours. And very carefully it was administered, too; only in places her clothes would cover, by someone who’s done it before. From the size of the marks, her father. Why? Very likely because he didn’t want her seeing the young man who’s lying there dead. Whose father didn’t want _him_ seeing _her_ , either. By the way, his father’s a maker of rope ladders: the young man was beaten with the raw materials of the trade. But he wasn’t above putting them to his own use. To avoid the two of them drawing attention, they went out separately. She left through the Ishtar Gate with the farmers leaving the city for the townlands at sunset, made her way here and hid herself up on one of the lowest boughs of the tree: he waited until after midnight, then went over the wall with a ladder he’d quietly been making for some weeks. This was a dry run for a more complete escape: they meant to make their way to another of the empire’s nearer cities. When we search Pyramus’s house you’ll almost certainly find his plans carefully written down and stashed away, very likely in a cache near the crack in the wall that their terraced houses share. Which these two lovers have been trying to touch each other through, and even trying to kiss each other through, for Heaven only knows how long… right up to yesterday afternoon, when they were doing their best to nerve each other for what they had in mind for last night.”

Marduk was staring at the God in amazement. Hermes Argeiphontês, however, was looking on with his arms folded, wearing an expression compounded of surprise and a great deal of pleasure. And Iaon, watching the God, found himself wondering a little at the slight touch of sentiment that had crept into the narrative. _Did he actually get that from the physical evidence, I wonder? Or did some of it come from me, and what we have together now…?_

“Well,” the God said. “Their story ends there, unfortunately. They’re silenced and can’t tell what they’ve seen to anyone anywhere but in the Shades. But fortunately, the evidence, in the form of mere humble physical reality, speaks for them. Because now the guards have to set everything up so that none of this nasty scene looks like it’s their fault. Someone’s already tried to scrape the marks of the struggle off the ground with the sides of his sandals. When that’s failed, someone else has gone over to the spring at least twice to get helmetfuls of water and splash them over the place to wash the prints away, because of course it’ll be a hot one tomorrow, as usual, and it’ll dry out and leave no marks… they think. Someone else with a dark lantern gets lucky, while the bodies are being arranged, and finds that lion’s footprint. Some of the lovers’ own blood is used to stain the veil, and the thing’s slashed with swords to make it look like a lioness’s postprandial plaything and dropped on top of the lioness’s track for extra emphasis. All the evidence is arranged so that it can be found by a ‘search party’ looking for the two missing unfortunates the next morning. And off everyone goes, and is back in the city before dawn.”

The Consulting God shook his head. “Unfortunately for them,” he said, “Death having had its say for the night, Life then takes hands with Love and does something quite unexpected. In the morning, it’s discovered that all the white berries of the great tree are stained red as blood. The captain of the guard, who’s constructed almost all the rest of this story, panics all over again, then regains his composure and cunningly adds one detail when telling it to the superior who answers to the Queen. The sad lovers’ blood drenched the tree and magically turned the berries red.”

“Kind of a stretch,” Iaon said. “Not to mention that you could butcher a bull under here and its blood wouldn’t spurt high enough to stain anything.”

“Quite right,” the God said. “Yet here are the berries… which leave us with an interesting question. It’s not as if nature does not sometimes react strangely to injustice or tragedy, as we know.”

“Adonis,” Argeiphontês said. “Hyacinthus.”

“Just two of many,” the God said. “Both dead in tragic circumstances, both transformed into flowers after the fact. Immortality of a very boring kind, in most cases, but it’s set a precedent. All through this part of the world, people’s deaths seem to go out of their way to impress themselves on the local flora.”

The God walked slowly over to the white marble slab, gazed down at it. “But in all the other events of this kind, a god or demigod has been involved in the transformation. And _this_ one, it seems, is no exception.”

Marduk’s eyes widened, even Argeiphontes looked surprised. As for Iaon, his eyebrows headed for his hairline. “What? Where?”

“There’s at least one possible suspect within easy reach,” said the God, glancing at Marduk in a way that could have seemed casual but was not. “One who could have been responsible for this change. For here—” He dropped to one knee, laid his hand on the white tombstone. “All the ground here and everything that grows in it is charged with a profound hatred of murder.” He looked at the two other Gods. “I detected it the minute I set foot here. You two can surely feel it, if you try.” His voice was quiet, but Iaon could hear something in it that perhaps the Gods couldn’t: a shiver of anger, controlled but very present. And something about the God’s words got down into Iaon’s bones and thrummed there with a strange note of satisfaction. _What was it I said once? Death’s Godson, yet Murder’s sworn enemy._

“And the tree felt what happened last night?” Iaon said. “And responded…”

“That’s part of it,” the God said. “But it raises more questions… which _you_ , Lord Marduk, need answered, and immediately: because the fate of this land, and your whole pantheon, lie together in the balance. This is why you’ve brought me here: the _true_ reason, which you didn’t even confide to the Investigator, and which you weren’t sure I’d discover. Which you perhaps even hoped I wouldn’t, because that might have meant the problem wasn’t as bad as you feared.”

Iaon could feel the God’s wicked smile spreading inside his shadows. “But if so, hope has failed you. Now it only remains to solve the case of which this one has been only a symptom. So perhaps you’d have the goodness to have one of your priests have a word with the Over Captain of the Queen’s Guard and let them know we need to find out which of the guard parties who were out last night include all the following: a man whose helmet's inside-cushioning is wet through, either one or two Guards-issue swords that are the cleanest and most recently polished of any in the company, and a pair of sandals that are extremely clean of any mud but nonetheless are showing signs of being stained with the juice of a green-blue moss on the soles and sides—intractable stuff, that, takes just _ages_ to get out.” The smile was going more feral, Iaon was sure. “And then have another priest let Her Semidivine Majesty Queen Semiramis know that her godly Grandpapa requires her presence to discuss a matter which will be as much to her advantage as to his. Specifically, the orderly disposition of the Babylonian throne, and the retention of her head.”

And he flashed that fierce baiting grin at Marduk and spun away. “Come on, Iaon,” he said, making his way out of the shade of the mulberry tree and off in the direction of the Avenue of Processions. “Let’s go to the Palace and see the Queen.”

Iaon rolled his eyes, for his opinion of Queens who weren’t his mother had become somewhat tarnished since Tiryns. “Another one,” he muttered. _“Wonderful.”_

But the God paid him no heed whatsoever. All Iaon could do was sigh and go after him; and together they made for the Ishtar Gate, with one nonplussed and one grimly amused God behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks again to the excellent Ivyblossom for the usual perspicacious beta.
> 
> Notes and links for this chapter are [here](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/55692659580/chapter-26-notes-and-links) at the [Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com)


	27. Of a Noonday Audience and a Case Within a Case

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _In this chapter:_ A pantheon’s fate hangs in the balance as the Consulting God deduces, Prince Iaon diagnoses, and a Queen’s deepest secret is revealed.
> 
>  _Warnings for annoyed royalty, insulting deities, perceptive mortals, political instability, addition and subtraction, hidden agendas, and decor that would give_ Architectural Digest _hives._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this chapter can be found [here](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/59323828889/ch-27-notes-and-links) at the [Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com)
> 
> Thanks again to Ivyblossom, best of βs!

“…We’re walking,” Iaon said.

“Iaon,” the God said, “there are days when the effulgence of your observations is well-nigh blinding.”

Iaon rolled his eyes at yet another version of this favorite sentiment of the God’s. But he wasn’t particularly bothered by it: the Consulting God’s tone wasn’t merely affectionate but almost gleeful. “Thank you. More or less. What I meant was, I’d have thought it’d produce more effect to just use the Cloak and pop out of nowhere in the middle of the throne room.”

“Sometimes,” the God said, “yes.” They had been strolling up along the Avenue of Processions for a while now, in a sort of bubble of space: for the other people on the road, now that the city gates were open, wanted little to do with the strange shadowy figure that was striding up the middle of the Avenue as if he owned it. “But not today.” He glanced over at Iaon, the day’s brightness piercing his shadows enough to reveal the silver glint of his eyes. “Reason it out, my Prince.”

Iaon sighed. “We’re giving Marduk and Argeiphontês time to settle themselves, because both of them need settling after what you just dumped on their heads. Though Marduk more than Hermes, from the look of things. In fact Dolios looked kind of like he was enjoying it, though Heaven only knows what that was about.”

“I expect we’ll find out. And…?”

Iaon grinned then. “We’re giving the people in the palace time to get ready for us… but not enough to calm down. Because the innocent will tell you the truth whether they’re calm or not, and the guilty shouldn’t be allowed a second longer to prepare than can be spared, and should be as nervous as possible.”

He could feel the _See,-you-got-there-eventually_ smirk right through those shadows. “Well done, you.”

“So _now,”_ Iaon said as they came up under the walls of Babylon, “you’re going to tell me what all that was _really_ about back by the tree, and out in the field, correct?”

“I ought to make you deduce it,” the God said, gazing around him as they headed past a double pair of heavily-armed and rather panicked-looking guards—who were regarding the God and his trailing shadows with profound distrust—and through the Ishtar Gate. “Good practice for you…”

Iaon sighed as they moved into the shade of the long passage through the massive outer wall, relishing the brief respite from that incredible head-hammering heat. “You won’t, though, because you’re going to have so much more fun telling me.”

The God’s shadow would have had to be much darker to hide the answering flash of grin, even in that shade. “You did some reading on Babylon last night…”

Iaon nodded. The research, while informative and useful, had really been mostly in self-defense, as the God had been stalking around in a strop over not being allowed to go to the crime scene _right that minute,_ and Iaon had sat reading for a good while in aid of paying his God only the minimum necessary attention while he walked off at least part of the annoyance. Then Iaon had moved on to paying him a different sort of attention, which had solved the problem at least until dawn.

“And what did you make of it?”

“Well,” Iaon said. As usual when dealing with a subject that might hit a little close to home, he preferred to approach it with caution. “The Queen’s a Goddess’s abandoned daughter, I gathered. Some liaison with a mortal…”

“Yet another handsome young shepherd,” the God said under his breath. “Seriously, Iaon, the waiting lists for shepherding positions in this part of the world must be thousands of names long.” He laughed softly. “But the one who came across the young man in question wasn’t just any of this pantheon’s goddesses. It was Derketo Askalanzi. The Fish-Tailed One, the Queen of the dark depths of the sea and the darker depths of the heart. The Lady of the Doves.”

Iaon raised his eyebrows at that, for doves were an attribute of Aphrodite’s as well, and drew her chariot. (Though the logistics of that had always fascinated him: he really needed to go over to the stable side of Olympus some one of these days and talk to the grooms about how they handled _that_.) “Relative of your Mum’s?”

“A local variant. At one remove.” They came out through the archway on the far side into the sunlight again, into a broad pale-bricked avenue that led down between buildings several storeys tall. Down at the far end of it, the great central ziggurat on this side of the river could be seen rearing up. Iaon and the God made for it, the people among whom they passed drawing away toward either side of the avenue to avoid them.

“Really,” Iaon said, picking up on a slight edge to the God’s tone. “Better variant, or worse?”

The God made an amused-sounding “hmf” noise. “Well. Granted, my Mummy’s more of a thinker than most gods or goddesses of the Sentiment Spectrum. But they all kick over the traces occasionally: and some combinations are more volatile than others. Take a goddess of _lurrrrve_ and add on rule of the ocean as well—”

“A bit stormy?” Iaon said. “Fertile? Unpredictable?”

“Oh, please, my Prince, _do_ try to avoid the banal. Precision’s far preferable.”

Iaon could hear the grin in the God’s voice, though. “Fine. Would it be more precise to suggest that Derketo possibly spends a lot of time plunging around the landscape like a mare with her parts on fire?”

“Mmm, closer to the mark, I’d say. And no restraining her when the urge hits: even for Marduk. He’s always had a bit of a problem with keeping the ladies of his pantheon from running amok…”

“Not something you’d say in front of him, though.”

“Wouldn’t recommend it, no.” The God’s tone was unusually dry. “Unless you like being around when a thunder-god’s sense of humor fails. Visually exciting, but tough on the surrounding infrastructure. At any rate, in Derketo’s case even Zeus would have his work cut out for him. Marduk and the rest of the gods spend a lot of time trying to keep her in check so that the local cosmic balance isn’t upset. All they can do is placate her, but when she gets her _urges.._.”

They paused at an intersection of roads to avoid being run over by a couple of chariots, then crossed. “She goes right out and scores herself some handsome mortal.”

The God was radiating scorn right through his shadows. “And if, as you might now put it, it turns out that the mortal in question isn’t shooting blanks—” and Iaon spluttered with laughter— “well, all _sorts_ of things can go wrong. In this particular case, the poor shepherd she targets falls ever so willingly into her depths and her darknesses, and before you know it you’ve got a very cranky pregnant goddess of the cthonic seas on your hands.”

“Dear Gods,” Iaon muttered, rubbing his face for a moment.

The God sniffed. “Quite. The unconscious minds of _all_ the realm’s gods and men alike turn into a perfect _mess_ until it’s all resolved. Fortunately it sorts itself out within the year, and not long afterwards the royal herdsman of the Babylonian court, a fellow named Simmas, stumbles upon a beautiful baby lying all by herself in some forest cave out in the wilds, wiggling around and cooing and being fed and guarded by flocks of doves.” The God made mocking fluttery gestures with his hands.

“Bit of a giveaway, that.”

“To say the least. Well, Simmas knows the miraculous when he sees it, so he takes the abandoned baby back to the city to raise as his own, and over time people at court are increasingly astounded by the foundling’s intelligence and beauty. Some twenty years later, one of the new young King Ninus’s generals, chap by the name of Onnes, finds himself talking to this minor functionary’s gorgeous daughter at some court function, and out of nowhere she starts dissecting the strategy and tactics of the kingdom’s last campaign against the Arabians. By the the time the dawn’s come up, it’s all over for _him._ The next day there’s a happy announcement, and a week later she and Onnes have tied the knot.”

“Why do I get the sinking feeling,” Iaon said, “that this isn’t exactly going to be one of those long-term happy marriages?”

“Because you’re a poet, Iaon, and you know the tropes. Sure enough, word gets around about the nobleman marrying the commoner, but somehow or other King Ninus misses the memo. Well, he’s got a war on his mind, after all. And in due time they all wind up at the siege of Bactra—because whole entourages of officers and their families and households go out to war together, in this part of the world—and while this is going on, Semiramis gives her husband some highly risky but brilliant advice on siege tactics. These hints he puts into effect. Before you know it, the city’s fallen with minimum loss of life. And though the King is obviously very pleased, this sudden access of brilliance is something of a departure of style for Onnes, and the King really wants to know exactly how he _came_ by the idea.”

“Oh no,” Iaon said.

“Oh yes. And Onnes…” The God shook his head, let out an exasperated breath. “Maybe he had a fit of masculine pride in his wife. Maybe he thought if he tried to lie, the King would catch him at it. Either way, he told King Ninus the truth. And the King instructed him to bring the clever lady around for him to meet. And when he first laid eyes on the lovely Semiramis…”

Iaon laughed a silent sardonic laugh down his nose. “Shortly after that, there was an accident, wasn’t there…”

“For certain values of ‘accident,’” the God said. “And the very first thing we now need to do is find out which ones.”

“Nasty,” Iaon murmured. But then for the second time in a few hundred paces he found himself being distracted as they crossed another intersection of two exactly identical side roads with the big broad avenue they were on. “Is it just me, or does this layout strike you as unusually…”

“Regular? Yes, apparently this is the first city built in these parts to use the grid concept.”

“Unusual,” Iaon said. He wasn’t entirely sure he liked it. The occasional straight street, of course, a city needed one or two of those; but he liked some variety of other shapes as a balance. This onward march of streets all the same width, and blocks of buildings all the same length, was beginning to give Iaon the irrational feeling that he was in some kind of cage.

“It might yet catch on, though. Imagine a time when all cities would be like this. Regular. Regimented. Artificially orderly.” And through the God’s voice, Iaon could hear his face wrinkling up in a strange distaste. “Hateful.”

The twitchiness Iaon was already feeling now made him turn a little contrary, if only to distract himself from his own unease. “You’re trying to tell me that you _like_ all those little narrow alleys and tiny twisty mucky crooked streets we keep winding up running down? Better than the prospect of a city built to let in some light and air?”

The God snorted softly. “Light can only do so much, my Prince,” he said. “It can’t force its way into the heart that won’t admit it. I promise you, this city’s got patches of black hatred and sinkholes of ugliness as dark as anything down one of those dank little alleyways. And the smiling countryside out there, those wide green fields—” He shook his head. “Out there in the lovely open air, how many places are there where blood stains the ground with no chance of justice being done the slain, because no one was anywhere near enough to hear the cries of the ones being murdered? How many bodies lie where they’ll never, ever be found?”

And Iaon found himself suddenly looking at a very old memory, something he hadn’t thought of in years: standing down by the riverbank near the Palace after the last of a series of violent storms. He was fifteen. The river was still running high and fast, its water opaque and tan with mud. And there half-buried in the washed-up silt of the riverside lay something that shone long and wet and yellow-stained among the new grey stones rolled down the stream from the mountain. Pitiful it lay there, mired in the muck: a man’s long thighbone.

The old chief Priest of All Gods had come down with Miki and some others from the Temple to take the bone away and give it its rightful due: first burning and then respectful burial. “Never been in the ground at all,” the old Priest had said, sounding weary and sad. “And the marks—” There were deep scrapes and bite marks on that bone, made by the teeth of beasts: wolves or wild dogs, probably—there were packs of both up in the mountains. The fierce rainstorms of recent days had sluiced some skeleton loose from where long grasses had grown about the fallen body and bound it down to the earth. All that time, for who knew how many months or years, the soul that had lived in that body had been trapped on the wrong side of the River of Death, endlessly wandering, miserably lingering, powerless to move onward into the final surcease of the Shades.

Homer whispered swiftly in Iaon’s ear, now as then, at the memory of the bitemarks, speaking of terrible moments, savage moments from the long-past battlefield: the ultimate threats of utter hatred. _I will leave your corpse as a plaything for the vultures and the carrion dogs; no burial for you, no fire, no urn; the beasts will batten on your fat flesh and the birds will pick you apart…_ And he came back to himself and found himself still walking beside the God down a wide tidy city street in broad daylight, while also, with a shiver, seeing it and the sunny fields outside as the God saw them: seeing the battlefield, one haunted by the shadows of eternally wandering souls. For the God they were doubtless a challenge, a problem to be solved. But to Iaon—

He licked his lips, momentarily unnerved by a rush of sorrow and pity. “I’ve darkened your mood,” the God said after a moment, glancing over at him.

“A bit,” Iaon said. “Given me something to think about, though. Not necessarily a bad thing.” He swallowed. “Which leaves us where?”

“Working out exactly why Marduk needs us here,” the God said. “Not this murder of innocents. That was his excuse, though.“

Iaon’s eyes widened. “Wait. You’re not saying he was _behind_ this murder somehow, are you?”

“What? No, of course not, he hasn’t anything like the wits to set up something so involved. No, something that’s going on here has been on his mind for some time. He’s been waiting for something unusual enough to give him a reason to call in Argeiphontês, and through him, me. And it’s to do with the Queen. Something he’s quite concerned about, but doesn’t dare hint at.”

“Or simply hasn’t mentioned, just to see how good you are,” Iaon said. The thought made him bristle.

“Well, we’ve paid him out a bit for that just now,” said the God. “But we’re not done yet.” He was scowling through his shadows, and they writhed and wreathed around him, streaming back from the Shadowcloak and causing some of the passers-by to attempt to press themselves right into the walls of the nearby buildings. “From all accounts Semiramis is a steady player. Even clever, as mortals go. Yet something made her lose her composure sufficiently just now to send the surveyors out in the middle of the night—”

“You’ll read her heart and find out why.”

“Of course I will, Iaon. Though I’ll deduce her first: why be lazy? But then the question becomes what to do with the data. Marduk himself is unnerved enough by whatever’s happening here that he’s willing to lose face by bringing in someone from a rival pantheon to get to the bottom of it. You saw how he reacted when I told him his whole power structure was under threat—”

“Not a guess, then.”

The God looked at him sidelong. The lack of denial made Iaon’s eyebrows go up. “All right,” Iaon said. “And that little explosion you set off under him just then with the word ‘Grandpapa’: completely on purpose, that? While also a shot in the dark?”

The God’s grin was perfectly audible if not entirely visible. “And another good one. There are, after all, some resonances between our two pantheons. And that being the case, just because a Goddess is born from the sea doesn’t mean she might not have a father somewhere too. I should know.”

Iaon shook his head, blew out a breath. “Complicated…”

“You have no idea.”

“I take it no one’s meant to know?”

The God shrugged. “Intrapantheon politics,” he said. “Or for all I know, simple embarrassment. It’s no affair of mine. I simply wanted to make sure I had Marduk’s attention. Now he’ll pay attention when we get to the really important business.”

“Which was _not_ surveying for a temple in the middle of the night…”

The God shook his head. “A symptom of something else entirely. A fool’s errand, trying to hide such an endeavour…”

“Especially from you. Would you take it amiss if I told you that whole business with the ropes was _unusually_ brilliant?”

“Amiss? Hardly. I do so hate interrupting you when you’re talking sense.” The God’s voice was almost a purr.

Iaon chuckled softly. “And that bit with the moss? Amazing.”

The God’s grin burned right through the shadows again. “That particular moss is used as a dyestuff by weavers who want a fadeproof cyan-blue,” he said. “I’m reliably informed that it’s a nuisance to get out of children’s clothes.”

 _“Informed_? By _who_ on Earth—” And then he had to break off and just laugh. _“Not_ on Earth? Oh, come on, just stop it now, I can _not_ believe that any of your Mummies do _laundry_.”

The God chuckled. “When it happens, it’s Athena, as a rule. She’s the queen of tapestry-making, after all. Her work’s given her extensive data on how to get stains out when the occasion demands—besides all the information there is on how to get stains in so that they’ll _never_ come out.”

They paused at one last intersection before the street ended at the great ziggurat. It was not merely gold-glazed brick, but gilded as well, blinding to look at everywhere the sun struck it directly; and the diffuse light from the sun hitting its far side spread a halo of radiance around it. Iaon shook his head in wonder at the thing—level after level of tremendous terraces rearing upwards, some of them planted with small forests of trees or with overhanging greenery drooping down from them all in flower. But the God merely snorted softly. “So _tacky…”_

“Oh, come on, Olympus has gold all over the place.”

“Nothing like this, Iaon. But then _this_ is mostly about impressing visiting ambassadors from surrounding countries. Not that there’s not actually some sense to it; far cheaper in the long run to overawe your neighbours with your vast wealth than to go to battle with them. Not that you don’t need an army, too, to make the ploy pay off.” He glanced around in scornful annoyance. “But it’s all flash and bling and conspicuous consumption with you mortals. You’ve got such abysmal taste...”

“Yet somehow I’ve got taste enough to be in love with _you,”_ Iaon said under his breath as they crossed the final street, making for the bridge that led over a broad moat-like canal to the ziggurat’s street-level doors. “Might there be hope for us yet?”

“Well,” the God said as softly, with a wicked sidelong look. “There are always exceptions that test the rule. Discuss it later, shall we?” And he swept on up the shallow flight of steps to the doors.

There stood the best part of a whole phalanx of gilded spear-armed guards in bright pointed helmets, their cross-winged chest harness flashing with enamel and jewels, and the God picked the foremost and tallest of them and made straight for him. “The Queen,” he said in a carrying voice, “is expecting us.”

It was a toss-up, Iaon thought, whether the guard would move aside. He looked very unnerved, but unfortunately he was also at the head of a great crowd of his mates, and in a position where backing down would make him the butt of mockery for days. And in the event, he didn’t even have time, for the God just went straight at him—

And straight _through_ him, in a sudden wide-flung flurry of shadow that somehow terrifyingly made the guard look for an awful few moments as darkly transparent as a ghost, and the Consulting God briefly more solid and real than any of the mortals around him—all of whom backed away in terrified haste. The God didn’t even slow down, just kept right on going into the shadows through the doorway

Iaon, shaking his head, came up behind and glanced at the one or two brave men who’d retreated the least. “Come on, give me a hand here…!” Among them they got the poor guard captain up on his feet again—looking solid again, though understandably frightened out of his wits. “All right there, fella?” Iaon said, steadying him while taking a moment to peel back one eyelid. “Yes, thought so, just shock. And who’d blame you. Sit him down in the shade for a bit,” Iaon said to the others, “and get him a drink. Possibly something with a bit of kick to it, if you take my meaning…” And he went after the God, through the great doors and into the shadowy interior of the ziggurat’s forehall.

The God had slowed down a bit and was looking over his shoulder to see Iaon come. Further along in the huge front hall, Argeiphontês and Marduk were standing, awaiting them at the end of a long corridor defined by a double row of mighty gilded statues of the Gods of Babylon. “Ah,” the God said as Iaon caught up with him, “there you are.”

“Nice trick, that,” Iaon murmured as he fell in beside the God and they continued down toward the two Gods waiting for them. “Haven’t seen _that_ one before.”

“One should always keep something in reserve,” said the God.

“Maybe so, but you could bloody well _warn_ me the next time!”

“And where would be the fun in that?”

Iaon rolled his eyes as they came up with Hermes and Marduk. “Hope we haven’t kept you waiting too long,” he said.

Argeiphontês’ resigned look developed a touch of smile, but he said nothing. “I’d have thought you’d have been in more of a hurry, Consultant,” Marduk said.

“Not at all, lovely city, hate to miss a chance to see the sights,” the God said. “You ought to have come with us.”

“Not exactly the kind of thing a head of pantheon can get away with, unfortunately,” Marduk said. “Lowers expectations. If mortals should see me walking in the streets, it’d give them ideas.”

“Which of course mortals must not be allowed to have under any circumstances,” the God said lightly. Iaon hoped sincerely that only he and Argeiphontês were equipped to understand the full depth of the mockery in the God’s words. “Straight through, is it? After all, normally a setup like this is preparation to see yet _another_ God…” He gestured back toward the double line of over-ornamented statues, then turned toward the next great pair of doors, tall bronze ones with bright enamel-and-golden overlays reminiscent of the designs on the outside of the Ishtar Gate. “After you.”

The doors opened for them—Iaon assumed by human agency, for he could hear the sounds of footsteps inside, retainers doubtless hurriedly taking themselves away after what they’d been told was to be a most private audience between the Queen and her God and his guests. _But I bet this place is as full of hidden cubbies and listening-holes as an old cheese is full of cheesemites. Hope she’s certain her people won’t blab, because if ever there was a conversation someone here could make money from having eavesdropped on,_ this _one’s going to be it…_

They walked through the doors, and Iaon looked down along the vast space of the room and was simply astonished. _This has to go straight to the far side of the ziggurat, he thought, right up against the river._ And as they headed into it, the three Gods and the mortal together, Iaon began to think that perhaps the Consulting God might have had a point… because this place was calculated in every possible way to inculcate the viewer with a sense of awe secondary to the display of sheer staggering wealth. The decor made the throne room in Tiryns look like an exercise in tasteful understatement. Everything around them here was about having way too much money and not caring who knew it—everything from the pillars (all hewn from varicolored marbles and their veins inlaid with tiny gems, and no two of them alike) to the ceiling (great stretches of ivory carved a handspan deep in an amazing writhing panorama of fabulous beasts and fishes and birds and men and women and gods and goddesses, with all the empty spaces filled in with twining golden vines bright with enamelled flowers and hanging jewel-fruit) to the walls (covered with broad expanses of mural work in precious woods and yet more giltwork illustrating great deeds of previous Kings and Queens, fabled hunts and battles and feasts where they had invited Gods to dinner and the Gods had actually turned up), and right down to the floor, which seemed like about three square stadia of diamond-shaped tiles of white and black onyx and red porphyry and grass-green jade; and every spot where four tiles met had a jewel of some kind set in it. Iaon kept his face quite still while reflecting that this single floor was probably worth more than everything in his Kingdom’s city: in fact, probably worth more than the whole Kingdom.

He also began to think the God might have had another point as well. _If I was from a neighbour country and saw this, I’d have one of two thoughts. Either, ‘I want to trade with these people and get filthy-rich enough to have something like this of my own’: or, ‘I hate these people and I’m going to come take this off them.’ They must really have some army to keep everyone in the area from going straight for number two…_

They walked on toward the dais at the far end. Light spilled down there through a great square atrium space punched up through the ceiling. Iaon realized as they drew near that this was a skylight, one that let in the blazing morning light from the uppermost level of the ziggurat seven stories above. The interior of the great square shaft was completely walled about with plaques of bronze polished mirror-bright that reflected the light blindingly downward, and poured it goldenly onto the shape of the woman sitting in the great enamel-and-golden throne positioned directly below.

The woman who sat there was still as a statue herself, though under that fierce downchanneled daylight, she and her royal robes—all golden and fire-colored above, shading down to a jewel-starred indigo below—and the blazing mural crown she wore atop that fall of black, black hair, yet more blinding gems barely held together by metal—all glittered almost too brightly to look at. The radiance dancing about her was quite impressive. _But it’s missing something,_ Iaon thought; _it can’t really compete._ The godlight that wrapped itself unselfconciously about Hermes and Marduk was a living thing, as alive as breath or a heartbeat, as was the paler, edgier shiver of light that limned the God’s shadows. Glitter though they might, by comparison the fire of the jewels and the glint of the gold were quite dead.

But then there was the woman herself: and even just sitting there she was a different story entirely. She was easily as tall as the God, imposing, practically the definition of statuesque; broad-shouldered, big-boned, unquestionably beautiful in a quietly arrogant way. It was an unusual beauty, a long face with deep-set eyes and a mouth that would have seemed, on some other woman, a bit too wide. But _this_ woman wore that face with the self-possession and assurance of someone quite conscious of her intelligence, position and power. Iaon wasn’t deceived, of course; he knew what royalty did with their faces when there was need (which was most of the time). Her expression would be a disguise of sorts, and hence, as the God had once instructed him, inevitably a self-portrait of some reality more deeply buried. _Just a matter now of working out what the artist’s actually painting…_

Finally they all came to stand before that throne. For three out of the four there was no question of bowing to a mere Queen, demigoddess though she might be. Iaon, for his part, merely tilted his head a little as he looked up at her, holding his fire.

After a moment of looking at them, the Queen lifted her hands from the ruby-studded arms of the throne and crossed her arms on her breast, bowing a little where she sat. “The great Gods honour me,” she said in a soft voice that was lighter and higher than Iaon had expected.

“Yes, I’m sure we do,” the Consulting God drawled, sounding ever so bored; but Iaon knew better.

“All know the mighty Marduk,” the Queen said, leaning back again, “and also the God who among the Greeks holds the place of Nebu Merodakh, Herald of Heaven and Inscriber of Laws, who knows the deeds of men and Gods alike. Both of you are welcome. But who may you be, shadow-cloaked one?”

“One who comes to speak truth to power,” the God said. “And to discover what truths you will tell us in return. In your idiom, I would be called the God Whom the Gods Consult, _Kamu-neh ylapa-Leydah,_ the One who Discerns and Reveals. How positive the outcome of this meeting will be depends mostly on what you reveal willingly before I must do my part. And I promise you, O Queen, the more quickly we hear the full tale of your present situation from you, the better you will be served.”

Iaon, standing there quietly at parade rest, watched Semiramis favour the God with a look that suggested he was possibly out of his mind. Then that gaze turned to him, equally unimpressed. “And this mortal is doubtless some favourite of yours…?” The mildness of the scorn on the word was itself intended to be a dismissal.

Iaon felt the God’s eyes roll. “Prince Iaon Dasosarchëidês of Akhaia in the Greeklands,” the God said, turning almost entirely toward him and waving a graceful dismissing-you-right-back hand at the throne and the woman sitting in it, “let me make known to you the royal Sammuramat dumu-sal kur-uru Derketo, great Queen of Queens, Paramount Lady of Babylonia, mistress of the River of Life, beloved of the Gods and so on and so forth for about twenty more epithets, some of which may even have a vague basis in fact.”

The Queen’s eyes went wide, initially at the way the God purposely did the introduction backwards, presenting the more royal of the two to the lesser, and then more so at the mockery, completely unconcealed now. _Prat,_ Iaon thought in brief exasperation, _you couldn’t possibly make this any_ easier _for anybody, could you?_ Yet he knew the God was reacting to the Queen’s perceived slight, and it was hard to really get annoyed at him for that. _And anyway, he_ wants _her_ _annoyed. Fine…_

The Queen’s gaze had moved to rest coolly on Iaon again, judging, waiting to see what he would do. Iaon didn’t move out of his parade-rest stance except to give her a slight inclination of bow with head tilted and eyes briefly closed, a touch on the insolent side of gracious. The gesture said—as Iaon came up again and let his gaze rest in hers once more, not even slightly troubled— _You may have a fancy floor, madam, but I’ve got manners… and two gods to your one. One of whom is about to hand you your head, so I hope that crown’s pinned on nice and tight._

“I earlier sent you word through my priests,” said Marduk, “regarding the unusual deaths that took place near the late Great King’s tomb.”

“Yes,” the Queen said. “A peculiar occurrence. Unfortunate, but of no great importance, these deaths.”

“These _murders_ ,” the God said softly, “as it turns out.”

The Queen’s eyes widened, but in a way that Iaon found quite studied. “Murders are unfortunately common enough in great cities,” Semiramis said. “Yet all the signs, I was informed, were of an assignation of two peasants’ children that fell foul of a sad accident of timing.”

“There was an accident of timing, yes,” the God said. “But not theirs. Your guards, great Queen, have a case to answer in this regard. But we’ll come to that anon. Right now my main interest is in that tree. And in what happened to turn those berries the color of blood—”

“Nature expressing its grief at a tragedy of true love cut off too soon,” said the Queen. “Or so the priests told me.”

“Did they now,” said the God, sounding much amused. “Wonder how much your guard-captain’s paying them each week? Well, that’s a question for another time as well. But if nature routinely reacted so to every tragic death among mortal lovers, there wouldn’t be a fruit from here to Oceanus’s world-girdling stream that was any colour _but_ red. I much fear, great Queen, that such changes occur only when there’s godhead involved. Or demigodhead.”

The Queen shifted just a little, as if the seat of the throne had become slightly uncomfortable.

“So let’s track this business to its lair so we can move on to more immediate matters,” the God said, now starting what Iaon had been expecting: the normal roaming-around a given space that he so liked to do when deducing that sometimes the Prince wondered if the God would be able to deduce if you tied him to a chair. _…No, probably he’d just hump it along the floor, or stand up and carry it around with him._ “Which will require us to consider some events that would have happened around the time you ascended the throne to sit beside King Ninus of blessed memory. There’d have been a fair amount of talk about that, I’m sure…”

“Talk?” The Queen smiled a small tight smile. “The commons do little else. It’s a way for them to come to terms with what they cannot change. We permit it.”

“Good of you,” said the God, “as so much of it could have been read as sedition… coming from the sources it did at the time. Though I dare say a lot of names were taken in a quiet sort of way, because some of what they were saying must have sliced pretty close to the knuckle.”

The God began strolling gently to and fro before the throne. “But then it’s such an _old_ story, isn’t it? A powerful man sees another man’s wife for the first time, really _sees_ her… and shortly thereafter, something happens to the other man. A misunderstanding. An _accident_. Or the man winds up in the front line of an attack when he should have been way to the rear, directing the battle.”

The Queen looked like she was on the point of stifling a yawn: but Iaon, sensing the tension in the arms resting on the arms of her throne, knew better. “A very old story, as you said.” She looked over his head. “Lord Marduk, while your handmaiden is eager as always to fulfill your requests—”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t like to bore you,” the God said, his voice going exquisitely ironic. “‘Accident’, did I say? Perhaps ‘suicide by opposing army’ would be more precise.” He turned off to one side of the throne, pausing as if to examine the exquisite chasing-work on one side, a bas-relief of the Gods sitting down to the first banquet in Babylon after the city was built. “But even that would have been an oversimplification, I suspect. Was it a one-sided decision, or _two?_ Did husband and wife together realize what was about to happen to the husband, one way or another, and together choose an exit strategy for him that would leave her both protected and perfectly positioned for later vengeance? And of course anyone who might have had suspicions kept their mouth shut. Calumny of a royal is _such_ a nasty charge, and having one’s tongue torn out with red-hot pincers in the course of due process does tend to ruin one’s day.”

This time the widening of the Queen’s eyes wasn’t nearly so studied. Iaon reckoned that she wasn’t _quite_ so bored now.

The God started moving again, crossing in front of the throne with only a brief glance toward Semiramis as he went. It was meant to look casual, but once again Iaon knew better. He swallowed as he felt/heard that rush of pre-deduction observation start to pour over and through him, as bitingly cold as glacier-melt. Iaon held himself ramrod still to keep anyone from guessing at his struggle to keep the dreadful icy deductive chill from worming its way down into his bones and stripping his own feelings about what he was seeing out of the equation. _(—something ought to be missing, look for what’s not there as well as what is, arms covered but fingers showing some slight recent alteration in skin turgor to judge by wrist creases, could be situational, arms not bare, insufficient data to be truly conclusive—)_

 _No,_ Iaon thought, pushing back against the cold; _no, you can’t have my heart so just_ back off, _it’s just fine as it is and he might need it for something!_ And the pressure receded and the warmth started to flow back. _Getting better at this. Good._ “Never mind,” the God was saying, “it’s all ancient history now. But surely, a difficult way for one to ascend from a relatively minor position at court to the rank of Queen. And not just Queen in the sense of ‘King’s present favourite lady of the twenty or thirty potential temporary Queens in the seraglio next door’, either… but Queen Consort, crowned and enrobed and given the sanctified wine in front of the nobles of the city by Marduk’s own priest. Leapt right over the whole lot of those second-string wives out of nowhere? Yes indeed, I dare say there was talk, and then some.”

He paced away again. “So a dead general’s wife becomes Queen, and rules by a great King’s side for forty years. Playing the longest game, learning royalty from the inside, bowing a demigoddess’s power and intent to the yoke. Hiding her oath of vengeance away at the bottom of her soul. Waiting her time. And perhaps…”

The God paused again, looked over toward Iaon. What could be glimpsed of his eyes in this lighting was quite inscrutable. Yet Iaon suddenly felt sure he was being offered an opening, and a question. _Do you too see where this seems to be going? Am I on the right track here?_

Uncertainty. _So strange from him._ It was as if the God was feeling his way along, trying some new technique Iaon hadn’t seen before. _Never mind, give him what you’ve got._ Because it was something that had occurred to Iaon when he was reading through the biographical material on Queen Semiramis that Westie had brought them. “Perhaps waiting a little too long?” Iaon said. “Because love… can be a strange thing sometimes.”

 _“All_ the time,” the God said, turning away. “An essentially irrational business, sentiment. Yet… _ambivalence_. The slow discovery that the man who had your husband killed, the man who loved you desperately enough to break his own law, is still in many ways a _good_ man. Harsh, yes; cruel, sometimes, yes. Yet also an even-handed man and a fair one: the man who brought Law seemingly out of nothing into the business of rule in the East. Not an easy task.” The Consulting God shook his head, pacing. “Someone said it once. ‘Justice sits very high above the world… and it’s a King’s business to bring her closer to men.’”

Iaon’s gaze dropped to the floor’s beautiful tiling, in which he became very interested for some moments while his heart beat faster to hear that particular memory come out of his God’s mouth.

“The dilemma is impossible to resolve. Yet a King who can do what he is doing for his city and his growing empire is perhaps worth not assassinating out of hand. _Perhaps._ …So the Queen of Babylon rules by King Ninus’s side and does the things good wise Queens do: listens, advises, learns from errors, learns from successes. Grows older. Grows wiser still, and harder. Until finally her royal husband, her second husband, suddenly dies like her first under circumstances that look, to the uninformed, purely accidental. But are _not_. Because Ninus was murdered…”

A long breath of silence in the throne room.

 _“And not by her,”_ the God said. “By those intent on making it _look_ as if she’d done it. Not that she hadn’t originally intended to avenge her husband’s death on the man responsible for it! But—to her occasional torment, her guilt and shame—her original oath to Onnes was still not kept. Forty years of vengeance forestalled, of endless opportunities relinquished or refused. At first because it was too soon, because all eyes were on her. Then, later, because waiting a while more yet seemed the best way to lull all suspicions. And later still because she found she didn’t really want to kill him any more: because as a byproduct of working so closely with him in the rule of the land, she was coming to like him. And finally… it got to be more than liking. _Far_ more. But there was no peace in this for her, because always, again and again, she had to face the question. Is it sin to break an oath when the oath is evil? Is it an offense to gods and men to _refuse_ to enact another such offense—to return evil for evil because of your given word?”

The Queen was looking at the floor. The God, pacing before her again, was looking at the Queen. He was unusually still, as if something had stopped him in his tracks for a moment: something quite unexpected. Iaon noted it and kept on watching them both, steeling himself against the renewed flow of observation. _(—Slight new facial lining,_ very _slight, but with recent changes, too ill defined to be more than a few months old. Grief? Insufficient physical evidence. Clothing’s overtly unrevealing, underrobe’s silk shows insufficient break points in the under-jewel brocading for much repeat wear so the clothing is quite new, that’s interesting,_ why _is it interesting, it’s not as if a queen doesn’t have a few seamstresses around the place to throw together a new robe whenever she wants one, inconclusive again—)_

“Ambivalence,” the God said softly. “A more powerful influence, for good or ill, than one might expect. Producing, in this case, four decades’ worth of magnificent procrastination that spares the life of a flawed but great man… until someone else loses patience and murders him in her stead.”

Iaon stood there, watching his God carefully. _And here I’ve been wondering if this new thing between us was changing how_ I _deduce the world. It’s going the other way too, isn’t it._ For the God seemed to be deducing things that normally would have been more in Iaon’s purview, working them into his analyses in ways that previously would have been foreign to him. _He’s not sure how to handle them, though. It’s too new._

And something else was creeping up Iaon’s nerves and making him twitch: a growing sense that the God was stalling for time. Something was bothering him. _Something’s still missing,_ Iaon thought. _He knows he needs to go somewhere else with this but he’s not quite there yet._ What _is he missing?_

“So you bury him,” the God said, pacing once more. “An oddly located tomb for a great king. Some say that you’ve always intended to supplant him and take credit for the most positive results of his rule, and a tomb outside the city walls is just a first small step towards pushing Ninus’s name out of the empire’s memory forever. It’s laughable, isn’t it? Because _no_ one suspects the reality of what you brought to his funeral and buried in that ground with him: your absolute _hatred_ of those who killed him, your desire for revenge against them. And _this_ time you haven’t intended to hold your hand a moment longer than you have to. But even through your anger and grief you knew it was too soon to move just then. At any rate, soon enough to satisfy public expectations, you called in the architects and the surveyors and had them start planning a more substantial edifice to house the dead King’s remains. And the moment would have been coming quite soon, won’t it? You were scheduled to break ground on something _far_ more impressive before the year was out.”

The God stopped directly before her, and gazed at her with a smile that everyone in the room could feel… but only Ian could feel was false, no true sign of the triumph that should have been there. “Except it’s not a tomb that’s going to be a-building before the year’s end, is it? It’s going to be a _temple.”_

And now at last a reaction from Semiramis, an utterly unequivocal one: _rage._ The Queen’s eyes flashed with fury, and (Iaon thought) with something else. He saw her begin the movement to leap to her feet: he saw her ruthlessly control it, though the perfection of her tableau was broken as the toe of one shoe was left showing just outside the drape of the gown. _“Who told you that!”_ Semiramis said, low and dangerous. “It will be the last thing they ever tell anyone.”

“Anyone but me, perhaps,” the God said. “Or my Godfather, should he be so bored with business as to ask anything of the newly arrived dead. Not that he normally is… any more than the cowherd’s usually all that bothered about getting into conversations with the cows.”

 _So dry-sounding, so amused,_ Iaon thought, breaking out in a sweat that he hoped no one could see. _But something’s still missing. This isn’t enough._ What _is he missing??_

The God stood before Semiramis a moment more. Then he turned and came swinging casually back toward Iaon for all the world as if there was nothing unusual on his mind. But Iaon wasn’t fooled as the God paused beside him, as he bowed his head and murmured, “Prince. I require a second opinion. If you would…”

Iaon’s non-sword hand was hidden both from the throne and from the two Gods standing off to one side of them. He extended it a little way to his right for the God to take, out of all the others’ sight. _What?_

_Iaon. I can’t read her._

What?

 _I’ve been trying almost since we entered. Something’s interfering, and physical proximity isn’t helping me break through it. There’s some kind of roaring, I can’t hear her thought over it, and she should have spilled everything by now but she hasn’t and_ I have to read her, _too much rests on this, there’s something missing and I daren’t go further without it,_ I have to be sure—

Such anguished uncertainty wasn’t something one heard from the God very often, and Iaon instantly became intent on having it go away. _Take a moment,_ he said. _Let me look._

The only answer was the little nod the God gave him sometimes when he was very much off his stride and needing support, as admitting such out loud would be unthinkable.

Iaon turned to look up at the throne, at the Queen. She had been staring in fury at the God who’d turned his back on her. Now she met Iaon’s eyes and matched him gaze for gaze, with an expression that said, _I dare you, little man: I_ dare _you to look at me with less than full respect._ It was the expression of a woman who was used to being underestimated by men, and tired of it. She meant to be intimidating.

But Iaon dealt with an expert in the art every day, and one Queen more or less was no great matter to him. He looked at the robes, having the advantage of having heard the God’s observation of them second-hand. The underrobe was a richly embroidered version of the Babylonian formal tailored wrap, blazing with gems and sitting very close and smooth over that handsome body, especially the bosom; displaying most of its beauties, concealing little. The bejewelled overrobe was cut and its angled embroidery and gems so applied as to make one look up at the graceful neck and the heavy collar with a double fistful of amazing saffron-hued diamonds glittering in it, pointing up eyes above them that were as golden as the God’s were silvery. But always the eye was led back by the cut of both robes to the one great pendant stone that lay shifting and sparkling blindingly with each slow breath, and to the breasts it lay between…

 _Interesting,_ Iaon thought. _And a bit unusual, really._ For he still hadn’t forgotten Arêtë snapping at some long-ago teenage suitor, _My_ face _is up_ here! _…Yet this one doesn’t care about that,_ _does she. If you’re male and looking at her in here, she’s taunting you; teaching you your place._ It was the attire of a Queen who wanted the men in her throne room to go right ahead and look at what they might desire but could never dream of being allowed to touch—a body the proportions of which were unquestionably alluring beyond expectation for a woman of her age, truly very like a goddess’s, and a woman whose beauty too was—

Iaon went quite still as something about Semiramis’s proportions suddenly occurred to him. _Because the jewels make it hard to see, don’t they. Especially in this light. And she controls the circumstances in which others see her._ And the color of the underrobe was interesting, mirrored in darker shades in the overrobe. Lighter, a golden-red dawn colour, up high near the great unmissable jewels and the fine full breasts; then shading quickly darker down past the waistline, and finally night-dark where the inner robe’s lighter silk and the overrobe’s heavier slubbed material draped to the floor. The effect was rich, but far less jeweled down low, since it was officially mimicking the evening sky: a sunrise in reverse. Nonetheless, whatever the reason, everything said _Look up. Nothing to see down here._

 _Oh really,_ Iaon thought.

It only took one more glance at the tailoring below the Queen’s bodice to make him fairly sure of what he suspected. ‘ _Earlier this year,’ Marduk said._ Iaon remembered reading that the Babylonian year started in the spring, when the moon was new right after the equinox and the river’s water had risen to its highest, dumping silt over everything and fertilizing the land. _…Yes, that works. And with her build…_

“Well?” Queen Semiramis said. Amazing how much threat could pack itself into just one word, spoken so softly.

But Iaon had heard worse in his time. “Great Queen,” he said, “I must beg your indulgence a moment.” He turned back to the God, beckoned him to bend his head down: tilted his head up as if whispering in his ear, while covertly taking his hand again. _My God—_

 _Iaon,_ what? _What have you found?_

 _If you can’t read a mortal’s heart properly… could it possibly be because she’s got_ two?

The God actually drew back and stared at Iaon in astonishment. _No!_

_Yes._

_But she’s not even—_

_Some don’t until quite late. You’d be surprised._

The God didn’t move for a moment, but Iaon almost staggered again as the God’s mind went up in an icy whirl of deduction for which not even the Prince’s experience so far could have prepared him. It was like being caught out in a hailstorm in winter, like being battered about the face and chest with the sudden stinging force of it. The God held still as a statue, and then Iaon heard him gasp, “Oh. _Oh! Yes!”_ from inside the shadow. And this time _he_ was actually the one who reeled.

Iaon felt wobbly himself, but kept his grip with the one hand, steadied the God with the other. After a moment the God lifted his head again, met Iaon’s eyes. The two of them exchanged a look, then turned back to the Queen once more.

“Madam,” the God said, “I told you it would be best for you to be forthcoming with us from the start. As it is our arrival will hardly have gone unnoticed. And in a city even lightning will routinely seem slow when judged against the speed of gossip. Connections will have been made between our appearance here and our investigation of the site of the deaths at Ninus’s tomb. Some will see their opportunity in this—a moment of weakness ready made for an attack on your rule. Others will suspect that their old plots are about to be revealed and will be readying themselves against the possibility that you may now move against them, with the result that useful evidence is probably even now being destroyed.” The God’s voice seemed casual, but Iaon could hear, could feel the tension in it. “It’s in our power to help you in the danger you now face. But you must make plain to us enough details of your situation that we can be of assistance.”

 _Still missing something. What?_ What _on Earth—_

The Queen was sitting like a statue again, like a carved image, perfect, untroubled. _Except for that one crack in the perfection,_ Iaon thought. _I doubt she even notices._ The toe of that shoe, just showing under the darkness of the starry underrobe—

A soft shoe, tan leather, worn in. _Comfy shoes,_ Iaon thought, and then was briefly amused at something that had proven him right. _Because what woman who can avoid it wears uncomfortable shoes when she starts really_ feeling _that she’s carrying double? Especially when she knows she’s not going to have to walk anywhere, and it won’t show._ It was, at the very least, circumstantial evidence in support. “My God,” he said, and let the direction of his gaze send the message.

“Oh,” the God said, looking at the tip of the shoe that was showing… looking at it _hard._

And then Iaon heard the great sudden rush of breath, intaken this time, the sound of a final shock and rush of deduction as the very last pieces of a puzzle dropped into place—

Softly the God began to laugh. The volume of it grew, a rumble of deep slow laughter that filled the whole room, and there was a touch of the theatrical about it. But at the back of it, finally, _there_ was the triumph, the certainty that Iaon had so wanted to hear. “Well then,” the God said, “never mind! You won’t be open with us about why you need our help? Then we’ll just take ourselves away, great Queen, and leave you to handle the local situation by yourself. But you’ll know as we go that on a single moment’s ill-judged impulse you’ve thrown away _forty years_ of work and waiting. Without our help, and your God’s, your enemies will shortly fall upon you and tear your realm apart. And then what will become of the legacy of protection you hoped to leave your son?”

The Queen did not move a muscle. Even that jewel resting between her breasts went still, absolutely unmoving, as Semiramis went pale as papyrus. Marduk’s mouth actually dropped open.

“Though possibly you can’t be blamed,” Iaon said, “it having been the first time you’d really felt him kick. The point now, I think, is to make sure he survives.”

The silence in that room was extraordinary. After some moments the Queen’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Until:

 _“Him,”_ she whispered.

“Granted, you didn’t dare hope,” Iaon said. “And anyway you’re not entirely human, so if your monthly flowering went missing for a few moons or so, who could be sure? It might have been your age. It might have been stress. Might be that’s even happened before. But no matter how you and Ninus had tried in the past to do what royalty always has to, no matter how many times you tried over _decades—_ nothing of _this_ kind had ever happened, had it? So when beyond any and all possibility you felt the life in you, felt him move…”

“And at the same time, perhaps even in the same hour,” said the God, “when you got the first news of what your most trusted nobles were finally getting ready to do—”

“You had nowhere to turn for help,” Iaon said. “And it’s no surprise that someone in such a situation, alone, in danger, who suddenly had a life besides hers to protect…”

“Would panic,” the God said. The words were like a trap snapping shut.

Silence in the room again.

“Because you have so many enemies,” the God said. “And they’ve been lying in wait for you for decades. At first it was just the usual misogynistic nonsense from men who feel that a young and beautiful and intelligent woman is a threat to their power, and will manipulate her husband in ways that aren’t available to _them._ But they bide their time. Soon enough, they tell each other, she’ll fall out of favour. Soon enough he’ll trade her in for a younger, prettier model.

“But that never happened, did it? Because it wasn’t just the face and the shapely body that attracted Ninus’s attention—not that any of the idiotic proto-rebels understood that. Some of them, though, would have started calling to mind the strange stories of the child found in the wilderness, the baby protected by Derketo’s holy doves, and they put two and two together. This durable beauty, this quick deep intelligence—this is the sign of divine blood, this is a _demigoddess_ they’re dealing with. And who knows what her abilities might be? Probably the thought frightened them for awhile, quieted them down. But not permanently. They started getting restless, started testing you, didn’t they?—looking for weaknesses. Laying traps for you, which you cleverly destroyed or eluded. Maybe one or two of the men involved were caught and killed in these attempts, which scared the rest of them into quiet again for a while.”

The God shook his head, pacing back and forth again. “But again, not forever. Ten years or fifteen or twenty go by, and these men, or their sons, start muttering again. The Queen’s too old to be so lovely still. And why has she borne the King no son? More to the point, why doesn’t he have any son at _all?_ He’s got other women he can go in to in order to ensure the succession. Yet he goes to none of them.” The God’s voice went dry. “And there are mutterings from the women’s quarters over _this_ as well. The King cares only for the Queen Consort. It has to be some spell she’s cast over him, so that she’s the only one who seems fair in his eyes. Some of these women—willing and unwilling ‘gifts’ from other kingdoms, potential royal brides jealous at seeing their chances snatched away—make common cause with the rebels and invent stories of the Queen’s evil magics. How she has a secret room at the ziggurat’s top containing only a couch, and there she causes young men to be brought to her, lies with each one for just a night, saps his vital energies for her beauty’s sake and has him killed at dawn. Utter nonsense… but there are always those willing to believe. You and Ninus must have spent hours of your time each week listening to your spies’ reports of the rebels’ plots against the two of you. And that too acted strangely to draw you close—consolidated your sense that it was the two of you alone together against a world that wouldn’t just _let you do your jobs.”_

Iaon took a breath. “And then things changed, didn’t they,” he said. This side of the story was suddenly putting itself together in his head just as physical evidence did for the God, piece fitting together with piece in a sort of beautiful inevitability. _And could that be it? Is this new connection between us somehow bringing_ his _ability to bear on the things that normally till now have been_ mine _to see?_ “Lovers have been going out to that mulberry tree for clandestine meetings for quite a long time, we’re told. Somehow I get the feeling that not all of them have been commoners.”

He glanced at the God, who bowed his head in agreement.

More silence. The Queen was breathing again, but it was a terribly controlled kind of breathing now: the kind with a grief behind it that is not going to be allowed out.

“So what happened just now was not just nature responding to the murder of two mortal lovers, however tragic,” the God said. “And not just the reactivation of an old grief, an old fury, either. But something so much more powerful, closely bound up with that. The need to defend another from the fate that befell his father. The threat to your blood _and_ his. The need, at all costs, to protect your child-to-be… the only thing left of the man you hated so long, and then so slowly and so strangely came to love. And whom Death stole from you practically on the eve of the realization.”

The Queen’s gaze had dropped to where it would not have to meet that of anyone in the room.

“Maybe all it finally took was the acceptance of what had happened between you,” Iaon said, musing. “Forty years it took to wear that last wall thin. But finally, after all those years… something he said, something he did, broke it at last. Let the flood waters out. Finally your mind and your body were in accord. And when that happened… the way became clear for the one thing that hadn’t happened yet.” A sort of somber pang, still edged with joy, twisted his heart as Iaon thought of how abruptly those walls could be broken without warning by something utterly unexpected: a sudden gift, a day spent shooting up melons, a night spent practicing breaking down a firearm—

“A little too much wine,” the God said: and his voice had gone oddly subdued, almost gentle. “A little too much laughter. A sudden urge to do something crazed, something young lovers might do in the middle of the spring festival, when the waters rise to their peak and the full moon’s high. The two of you, cloaked, stealing out of the city very late by some hidden way, with a skin of wine hidden under your robes. Running across the fields to the spring in the moonlight. Taking refuge in the old tree’s shadow. Falling down together on a bed of that soft moss…” He stretched out a shadow-gloved hand. “Of which I can see the stain _right_ _there_ on the sole of your shoe.”

The Queen looked down in shock. “Not all your handmaids’ scrubbing has budged it,” the God said. “No matter. It confirms this part of the tale. Whatever he said to you on that midmost day of the Akitu festival, it moved your heart toward him in some small unaccountable way… and shifted the last stone in the wall. There under the mulberry tree your power, and your love for him, so long held at arm’s length, flowed forth. There they sank deep into the earth itself and the water of the spring where you purified one another when you were done. For where the heart goes at last, the body follows.” Iaon didn’t need to see, but could feel, how the God’s gaze slid sideways to rest on him for a moment. “And when the two of you embraced that night, at last the divine portion of your being put forth its power and allowed your body to accept the gift it had refused so long, the gift of his seed.” The God took a breath. “But he was never to know, for that was his last night with you.”

Queen Semiramis’s eyes had been fixed on the toe of her shoe for some time. Finally she lifted her face again and looked at the God with fascinated horror.

“I have no idea what to make of you, dark one,” she said at last, her voice a little roughened by the feelings she would not display. “How can any God or man _possibly_ know the things you know? You are either the embodiment of utmost evil, or one of the Annunaki of Light.”

Iaon bowed his head for a second to conceal a twitched half-smile. _Well,_ that’d _be an opinion we’ve heard before…_ And he looked up again. “Great Queen, will you tell us how he died?”

Semiramis let out a long weary breath. “It was poison,” she said after a few moments. “But then poison loves the houses of great princes…” She looked up again. “You were right, O Discerner. They _did_ test me. Poison was the very first way. Quite by accident, at first, we learned that the things men find deadly when eaten or drunk could not harm me. The assassins became frustrated, tried deadlier and deadlier venoms. I drank them in public several times, smiling in the would-be killers’ faces, to prove a point.” She produced what was probably the reflection of one of those smiles, so edged with a sort of bitter resignation that Iaon had to turn his face away for a moment. “Eventually they gave up on that tactic. But then ten years or so later would come a new faction who didn’t believe the old one’s tales of failure, thought they were making them up, and would try the old ploy again.”

The smile faded. “Yet over many years he and I grew casual about it.” She scowled—a shadow of many other such moments of fury and regret, Iaon thought. “That night when we came in again, it seemed a new world, somehow. We were careless, we were joyful, we were yet a little drunk… Neither of us thought to call the servants for fresh wine. We had left some in cups on the table by our couch. Each of us had our own favorite one, well known to the servants and slaves. We were on the point of drinking when Ninus saw something wrong with the dregs in his cup, and I knew. We both started laughing: that night of all nights, it just seemed so _absurd_. I snatched it from him and drank it. Something we had done too many times, for a jest… Folly.” She closed her eyes. “He laughed and took mine…drank it.”

“But _both_ the cups were poisoned,” said the God.

She nodded, eyes still closed.

“Hence,” the God said, “the public story that he choked on something at a festival dinner.”

“So he did,” the Queen said softly. “His last breath.”

Iaon’s own breath caught. “I am so sorry,” he said.

The Queen looked at him, as she’d looked at the God earlier, as if he’d suddenly dropped onto her shining floor from some distant alien sphere.

“So you buried him,” Iaon said, “in the last place where the two of you were close. And you planned… what? Originally to build him a great tomb there, not just some small slab of stone.”

“There’s a six moons’ mourning period for a fallen King,” Marduk said. “No such building work could have been begun until that was past.”

“But it nearly is now,” said the God. “And others won’t care about mourning periods and propriety. They’ll have been making their own plans. The would-be rebels—now the second generation of them as well, perhaps—they’ll be seeing a chance to get finally get rid of the witch-queen, the plotter and schemer, the woman who’s kept them kicking their heels uselessly at the doors of power for four decades. Peace when there could have been war, stability when there could have been civil war and bloodshed…” The God shook his head and _tsk_ ed in chilly sarcasm.

“Idiots,” Iaon muttered.

“It would have been a little before midnight that you’d have felt the first kick,” said the God. “And while you were still sitting there in shock from it, one of your spies came to you with news that the long-planned attack against you was finally in train. Men of the army, suborned with gold or promises of power, would rise up at some convenient time just after the six-month blackout period was over—”

“There’d normally be a vintage feast coming this time of year, wouldn’t there?” Iaon said. “We’d be having one about now in my homeland.”

“Yes,” said the Queen. “The Feast of Booths, we call it.”

“Perfect,” Iaon said, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Then that’s your date. Knowing how these things usually go, half the population and a significant portion of the army will be compromised either due to being drunk or being hung over. Then the rebels bribe their way into the palace, overwhelm your personal guards, and imprison you and your ruling council, along with all the city guard and army leaders who support you. And as soon as a new leader’s been crowned King—”

“Only the High Priest of Marduk has that power,” the Queen said, “and he would never _dare_ to—”

“On the contrary, I’m sure he’s already been either bribed or threatened into agreeing to the consecration,” the God said. “Would have been one of the first things on the rebels’ list, I’d say. But once that’s done, the executions follow in short order.”

Marduk’s expression began turning truly thunderous. “Are you suggesting that _my own high priest_ respects me and my fellow Gods so _little_ that—”

“Oh, without a doubt,” the Consulting God drawled, “as I suspect both he and the rebels are assuming the Gods won’t really care about a coup as long as the sacrifices continue hot and on time. Especially since this pantheon, like so many others, was _established_ via a coup.”

This observation did not go far, Iaon observed, toward removing that expression from Lord Marduk’s face. His hand had slid to the hilt of the thunderbolt-sword, which was sizzling in a thoughtful way. Iaon cleared his throat softly. “My God…”

The God looked at him with slight surprise. “Prince?”

“Just backtrack a bit for me, if you would.” _And away from this tone that might just get that thunderbolt used on_ you _if you keep going in this vein._ “The Queen would just have felt the baby kick when she heard this news. It would have been—” He shook his head, trying to imagine it. “Quite a shock.”

“Unquestionably,” the God said. “Lesser mortals would have had to wait till dawn, take a breath, think things through. But a great Queen, impelled by sudden overwhelming fear, has the power to do exactly as she likes. And she just had to do something, _anything_ , to make her feel like she was in control of something right then; to buy her time to quiet her fears and think what to do next.” Iaon waited for the scorn to come. To his surprise, it didn’t. “So in the middle of the night, in great secrecy—or what passes for it in a city of so many thousands—the surveyors are rousted out. But they’ve got new instructions this time: orders to remeasure the site for a different purpose. And then a special party of the night guard is hastily assembled. Maybe a bit too hastily, in retrospect: the most senior guards captains are off shift at night, after all.” He glanced at Iaon.

Iaon nodded. “But the shock has stirred the Queen’s power up again,” he said. “The earth and the water of the spring are alive with it. With the thought of her blood, and _his_ blood, running together through the child that lies under her heart.” He sighed, looked up at her. “And when the guards get out there, and the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe begins… it’s too dark for anyone to see that the berries have already turned blood-red.”

There was silence in the room for a number of breaths. Finally the Queen lifted her head.

“All else has been true,” she said softly. “This must be true as well. God who Consults, you have read my heart to its depths.” She lifted her head again, tilted her chin up, straightened her back against the back of the throne. “What, then, shall be done?”

The God looked at her oddly for a moment; then glanced away. “By me? Nothing, as yet,” he said. “Because we’re hardly finished here.”

Hermes and Marduk and the Queen all looked strangely at the God.

“Sorry?” Iaon said.

“We’re not done at _all,”_ the God said. “Because in the Queen’s moment of seeming irrationality… is _method_ , not madness.” He turned back toward Hermes and Marduk. “What did you take it for, Lord Marduk? Some display of feminine frailty?” And _there_ was the scorn. “From _this_ woman? _Please.”_

The God turned back toward her. “What will we do as regards _you_ , great Queen? Nothing. What follows as regards the murder of these two mortal lovers? That will be between you and your guards, and at one remove, between you and your own own God. Though while he can bring the storms and order the seasons and war down rebellious goddesses of the primordial Sea, over mortal hearts I’m afraid he has little sway… and over geopolitics, none at all.”

And the God gave Marduk a look. “But then again, _earthly_ politics isn’t really anything to do with why I’m here, either. _Is_ it, Lord Marduk?”

The Queen’s expression altered so far as to display some alarm, which Iaon saw her quickly camouflage as confusion. Marduk’s face got that tight I’m-sure-I-have-no-idea-what-you’re-talking-about expression again. Argeiphontês sighed and glanced over at Iaon with a tilt of his salt-and-pepper head, and the expression in his malt-brown eyes was edged with warning. It said, _You’d best_ _be ready to stop him if this gets out of hand._

Iaon glanced at the bound thunderbolt shoved casually through Marduk’s belt and wondered if this was when he might finally run afoul of one himself. He swallowed and nodded to Hermes.

As far as Iaon could tell, the God had noted none of this. “Advanced eschatology is something that often gets given the go-by in divine education, because it does tend to give _Gods_ ideas,” he drawled, “but of course I’m happy to spell it out for you just this once—”

It was one of those moments when Iaon started to wish he actually had a name to call the God by; and ideally a second name as well, because his mother had always been able to wring so much more effect out of being able to say “ _Ia_ on _Pei_ thos Dasosarch _ë_ idês, you come in here _right this minute—”_

Iaon sighed. _“Oi!”_ he said.

The God stopped dead and gave him a bemused look.

“Just talk _me_ through it, all right?” Iaon said. “And with words of fewer syllables than ‘eschatology’, please?”

The God rolled his eyes, but at least now there was a sense of some humour being in play. “A pleasure, my Prince. Tell me: how do you make a God?”

“Um, well… they’re born of other Gods as a rule, I’d have thought.”

“Often. But there are other ways. And one very swift way for gods to become gods is when mortal men _declare_ them to be so.” Iaon could feel the Consulting God’s smirk starting to grow underneath those shadows. “It’s the power that flows from men to what they choose to believe in… or even what they’re just _told_ to believe in.” He laughed softly. “You’ll guess that this is an unpopular truth, especially among deities, as mortals are so fickle and difficult to manage, and no god likes depending on them for anything as important as the source of his or her power. But it’s a useful truth to know if you’re a demigoddess who wants your late beloved deified, so that your son by him will also be held by men to be a God… and so has at least a fighting chance of _becoming_ one. And thereby inheriting the considerable protections that come with even novice godhead while one’s divinity is settling in. A comfortable stable place to live, a college of guardian priests to watch over you, worshippers and devotees who’re devoted to your wellbeing and safety…”

The God turned to Marduk. _“You,_ however, my Lord God, have been worried for decades that something like this might happen. A schism in the pantheon, or the onset of civil war over Semiramis’s status, with all the disruption to worship and sacrifice and to your own power that either of those entails; or worst of all, both of them at once. You’ve been wanting to look into solutions, somehow, without revealing your concern to anyone else in Heaven or on Earth, because, as you say, they might get _ideas.”_ The wicked grin was practically burning its way through the God’s shadows now. “But you’ve held your nerve, I’ll grant you that. You waited most patiently until something not just miraculous but downright bizarre happened in your back yard. And then you got in touch with Zeus Cronion’s office and asked for an unusual sort of consult on a sensitive matter—all very hush-hush, one thunder god to another. Father Zeus, of course, master delegator that he is, shoved the matter straight off onto his Herald and Chief of Staff. And Argeiphontês, who always knows exactly what to do, quite sensibly then called me in to deduce what you couldn’t ask your granddaughter yourself, because it was far too sensitive—but nonetheless you _had to know.”_

The Queen’s expression had settled again into something far more mask-like. _That_ at least was a look Iaon knew, for he’d seen it on his royal father often enough; calculation would be taking place behind it at high speed.

“Because here’s the sixty-four talent question,” the Consulting God said, strolling toward the throne. “Does the Queen plan to become part of your existing pantheon… or does she plan to _supplant_ it? For she too plans to become, in men’s minds, a goddess. She’s working on it already. Just look at all this!” The God waved a hand at the throne, the light, the jeweled raiment. “And in her is not only her mother’s great power, but her own not inconsiderable intelligence. A terrifying combination. Is she an ally in the making, or an enemy waiting her time? For she can wait. Oh, does she _ever_ know how to wait! As you’ve seen. _Forty years…”_

The God whirled back toward them again. “And naturally you don’t dare just haul off and smite her. No good comes of Gods trying to kill Gods, either in the short term or the long. And anyway, you’re not even sure it would _take…_ or what would happen if it didn’t. She’s her mother’s daughter, after all.”

Marduk scowled like thunder and lowered his head, looking at the God from under his brows. Iaon was uncomfortably reminded of what a bull looked like when it was getting ready to charge.

“Oh, don’t look that way,” the God said, his scorn going all cheerful. “All this trouble has its source in you two keeping secrets from each other. This place where the destinies of Gods and men have been so closely entwined for so long is always going to be best served by both sides being open with one another.”

The Queen’s face had gone most noncommittal. Marduk’s expression was showing no signs of lightening. “Come on, seriously, can you not _see_ it?” the God said, turning from one to the other of them and starting to sound annoyed. “The solution’s so painfully _obvious!_ If you two will just work together, everything can be sorted. Marduk formally extends Heaven’s protection to mother and child and sanctions the deification of Ninus and his Queen and the babe to come: Semiramis in turn agrees to accept the protection of the Pantheon and never to willingly subvert it or allow her son-to-be to do so. If you protect one another’s weaknesses and reinforce one another’s strengths, the redefined Pantheon that will come out of your cooperation will be stronger than anything else in this region.”

Iaon caught the sudden concerned look that Argeiphontês shot the God. “Oh, not _ours_ , for pity’s sake, _”_ the God said irritably. “Because _that_ , great Marduk, is the price of my assistance in this matter: that you and the Babylonian Pantheon’s new Goddess will both be guaranteeing, by unbreakable oath on your respective godheads, that no encroachment on _our_ region’s eschatology will be allowed now or in the future. Argeiphontês, as Herald of the Hellenic pantheon, you naturally have power of attorney and plenipotentiary status to act in this matter on behalf of Cronion’s office, and you know the normal boilerplate language for such treaties…”

“Yes,” Hermes said. “Of course.”

“Yes ‘of course’, because _you_ helped certain divinities of our mutual acquaintance _write_ it back when we settled matters with the Gods of Ch’in; don’t waste everyone’s time being diplomatically modest.” Iaon wondered a bit what was going on there, as the God for some reason seemed far more nettled than a simple matter of someone else’s modesty would normally have rendered him. “If Lord Marduk is willing to be reasonable, we can wrap all this up here and now and be home in time for tea.”

The two other divinities and the semi-divinity in the room were all looking at Marduk now. Iaon stood quietly and concentrated on doing and saying nothing at all: for it seemed likely that a thunder god who suddenly realizes that he has no real options in a given course of events could be serious trouble.

But then, quite slowly, Marduk started to smile. And then the laugh broke loose, a near-volcanic rumble, long and annoyed and resigned and somehow still deeply humorous. Marduk turned to Argeiphontês. “You _did_ warn me!” he said, glancing at the God.

Hermes King’s-Messenger grinned back. “Yes I did.”

“Then let it be as you say,” Marduk said.

From directly overhead, low and long and sounding very meaningful, thunder rumbled. Iaon cocked an eye up at the atrium shaft, where the sunlight hadn’t wavered, and raised his eyebrows, glancing at the God.

The God produced his most self-satisfied grin inside his shadows and clapped his hands together. “Perfect!” he said. “That’ll set the tone nicely. So if we’re done with the mutual congratulation, I believe we presently have the small matter of a palace coup to nip in the bud. Lord Marduk, if you’ll summon a couple dozen of your warrior-priests, we can begin in earnest.”

He turned to the Queen. “Madam, summon your personal guard. The ones who might be sleeping, have them rousted out of bed. Anyone who tries to flee must be seized alive at all costs. And make very sure the over-captains of each watch are here.” And his voice dropped to a low chill growl. “We have some _vetting_ to do.”


	28. Of the Judgment of Shadows and the Approach of a Guest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _In this chapter:_ The Consulting God shows his dark side while derailing a coup: Prince Iaon starts having misgivings about his relationships, his motivations and even his hobby: and a postponed decision gets moved to the front burner.
> 
>  _Trigger warnings_ for brief mentions/memories of battlefield gore, rape, and child abuse. _Casual warnings_ for freaking out the innocent, revealing the guilty, justice served (cold), parades and celebrations, publicity (good and bad), wine running like water, and intra-pantheon two-timing. And now, back by popular demand: Bees! (Well, _one._ )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes and links for this chapter are [here](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/59496089852/chapter-28-notes-and-links) at the [Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com)
> 
> Thanks again to Ivyblossom, β of the Gods.

Since his own little Kingdom had suffered significant ill effects from an abortive coup in his granddad Ismenos’s time, Iaon naturally tended to have strong feelings about people who plotted to bloodily depose royalty. Those feelings got even stronger when the royalty in question turned out to be a recently bereaved and frightened about-to-be single parent. Nonetheless, he found himself feeling a bit sorry for the thirty-odd big strong men who shortly found themselves lined up before Queen Semiramis’s throne. _Her_ , they might have been prepared for. What none of them were truly prepared for was the undivided attention of the tall, dark, grim-feeling shadow standing between them and the throne, and the many, many other shadows that had flocked to him out of nowhere—turning the whole place, from its gleaming glittering floor to its ridiculously resplendent ceiling, into a terrifying kind of night-in-day.

The Queen and her throne were spared that darkness, seeming to float in a pool of roiling shadow, remote and dreadful. Iaon stood off to one side with his own little crowd of shadows, most of them leaning up against his legs as if he was back home in the Chamber, and (surprisingly) shivering a bit against him, so that he had to reach down and run his fingers through them every now and then to comfort them. Apparently they found the God’s present tone of mind unnerving. _And I know exactly what they’re on about…_

Off to one side, in a spot against the right-hand wall where the godlight about them and the apparently tacit agreement of the shadows were jointly making a bright spot, Hermes Argeiphontês and Marduk lounged side by side with heads bent together as they seemed to casually discuss something or other, with Marduk’s swordbearing priests standing ranked up and at ease nearby. But Iaon had seen the look on Marduk’s face as the place had started to flood with darkness, and wasn’t fooled by the indolent act. Argeiphontês looked untroubled, indeed amused, but Iaon knew from his stance that he had some concerns. Nonetheless Hermes now gave Iaon the same casual nod he might have given him if they’d been down at the Slug and Lettuce and it had been Iaon’s turn to get the next round in. 

Iaon nodded back and glanced over at the God, met his gaze. 

The God put his hands behind him and drew himself up, if possible, even taller than he already stood. “Gentlemen,” he said, his voice quite soft and deep but in the coldest way imaginable, “there have been whispers in this city for months as to something that would be happening at the autumn festival this year. Quite soon now, in fact. Big men, important men in the city, were going to stand up and shake the counsels of the mighty. There were going to be changes, great changes, for the better.”

The God’s voice dropped even lower. “And so there shall be,” he said, so very softly, with such dark relish. “But _not_ the ones they planned.” 

A chill ran right down Iaon’s back, and he shivered. _Marvelous. This is scaring_ me _and I’m not even in the line of fire…_

“The change those men most desired meant they had to be able to come at your royal mistress by surprise in her own home—the same woman who, along with her husband of noble memory, housed you under her roof and paid you a wage; who gave you her bread and salt to eat and her wine to drink in exchange for your service. These things you all received of her by your own free will.” The shadow looked down the length of the double line of them. “Yet equally of your free will, some of you have defiled the bread and the salt and the wine, betraying the trust that ought to be between one who hires and one who works for hire. You know how the Gods punish such betrayal. I am here to visit that punishment on those of you who merit it.”

The poor guards, all of them, were shivering. _And why not?_ Iaon thought. _Their gods can’t read men’s hearts: when the smiting starts, the chances aren’t much better than fifty-fifty that the right person’s going to get hit. But these fellows must surely suspect that something much different’s about to happen._

“I would greatly prefer,” said the God, his voice dropping even lower, “to hear your stories freely from your own lips. You have, therefore, ten breaths’ time to begin telling me the names and other details of those who have arranged to be let into the palace in the dead of night some nights from now, there to work their will on the Queen and those near her who remain loyal to her.” And he turned his back on them, almost ostentatiously. “Or you may waste those ten breaths in keeping silent… and one after another, those of you who are guilty of this betrayal will be forced to tell not merely the details of that truth, but _all_ the truths you would seek to hide, to everyone here. And after that, the shadows will have their way with you.”

A frightened silence fell. Iaon started counting breaths. 

“Bravery,” the God said softly, shaking his head. “Such a kind word for stupidity, don’t you think?” Iaon could feel the God’s thought turning to him, and to a thought that had flickered through _his_ mind shortly after he’d had a seeming maiden in his arms on that dusty forest road near the City. _Because you were in my head right then, not more than a minute after we’d met. Oh, you are a_ very _bad God._

_Four. Five. Six…_

“And four of you,” the God murmured over the last few breaths, “are so very, _very_ brave.” 

The guards shifted increasingly uncomfortably as the time ran out. The God shook his head, disappointed. Such a mild response, but it made Iaon shiver again. He could feel in the air, in the shadows stirring around him, something truly awful about to happen.

The God waved a languid hand behind him, not even turning around, indicating a single dark-haired big-shouldered guard—one of the shift captains, by his insignia—who stood one man down from the right-hand side of the second line. “That one,” he said, apparently to no one in particular. 

The shadows rushed in on the man and wrapped him about as the Shadowcloak so often wrapped the God. The Guard-captain stood straight and still as if his bones had locked together, and gasped out a strange pained cry— 

More shadows flocked to join the first ones, gathering thickly all around. And as they did, amid the smoky shift and slide of them everyone in the room could see glimpses and minutes of the man’s life start playing out, shown as if seen through his eyes; and in the depths and the chill of the shadows behind the pallid images roiled the things he’d thought and felt. First, as foremost in his mind, was the sight and thought of the money he’d taken as confidently as one entitled from a shadowy figure in a city tavern one midnight, the voice recognizable though the face was masked and hooded over. _Wants to be secret, fine, he’s not as secret as he thinks, but one of the powerful ones all the same, better on your side than hers, you’ll always have something on him after this._ And the voice saying “These doors need to be open between the fourth and fifth hours after midnight”, signals arranged, cuts for other necessary accomplices determined and paid— 

The other guards were shivering in earnest now as if winter had crept into the throne room. The Queen in her island of light trembled where she sat, and the priests of Marduk in their ranks looked like they would sooner have been at the world’s last battle than stuck in here. Hermes Argeiphontês and Marduk himself stood still, apparently unaffected until you looked at their faces set hard and unrevealing as masks of iron. The cold, the _cold—_ Iaon steeled himself against it, but he was too closely associated to its facilitator, its wielder, the one who had opened the floodgates to this darkness and was using that chill remoteness to hold it away from him. Not from Iaon, though: not now that they were bound. _I don’t want to but I’ve got to find a way to pull back when this kind of thing happens. Shut him out when he’s like this. No choice. Don’t want it but_ no choice— 

Because it wasn’t over, it wasn’t stopping. Shouts of rage, violent blows, soft words of promised anger, whispers of threat that cut like knives, they all fleeted through the shadows as the afternoon Guard-captain established his reputation as a hard man, not someone to mess with: a reputation that he actively enjoyed. Not that it was enough for him, though, never enough. There were little betrayals and bigger ones. There was envy of those over him, contempt for those below, smarting resentment of the ones above for the things they did to him that he couldn’t punish them for, nasty enjoyment of the little daily barbs that he could push into the skins of those he commanded. There were petty cruelties, purposeful swindles and little habitual thefts performed on his subordinates in the course of command and laughed off as jokes. Bribes accepted and then services unperformed or promises broken because the bribes weren’t big enough. City people pushed around and stolen from, frightened for the fun of it, imprisoned for laughs or to teach them a lesson. Lies told to justify the imprisonments if anyone above him actually evinced any concern for the city’s plebs. Records falsified, rumors started about subordinates too honest in their work or superiors too powerful to damage any other way; long nights spent laughing over bitter beer with the few cronies who could be trusted not to betray the game, because they were profiting from it too and he had too much on them for _them_ to ever blab… 

Iaon strove to breathe through the onslaught of ugly emotion, felt the shadows around him pressing in as if trying to protect him, and moaned a little very softly in his throat because it just wasn’t _working_. He was far too closely connected to the shadows’ master, who was watching all this with acute and chilly interest, matching the imagery moment by moment to what he’d deduced in that tiny slice of time when the men had come in to stand before the throne. Glimpses and flashes of earlier times, wartime campaigns when the Guard-captain was just a soldier in Babylon’s great army, not yet seconded to the Guard. Moments of rage and lust on the battlefield and the awful times when the two got confused—moments when the fury at being attacked and the dreadful arousal of violent defense commingled and the rush and horror of what was going on around him could trick a man into enjoying the conjunction, though later the admission might disgust and shame him. _Might_ , Iaon thought, writhing in shame at his own such moments, _but not necessarily. Not in_ this _case._ Here was the act itself and the enjoyment, dim through the shadows but not dimmed enough by half—swords punching through chests and chopping through bone, helmets rolling and clanging dully in the dirt because of the heads still in them, sweat running down arms and legs and bellies as other wet things ran, muscle engorged with heat and blood and other things engorged too, going hotly, horribly hard until blood or something else spurted…

And that hardness and release flowing inevitably over into other sensations and events that had become conflated with them in the afternoon Guards captain’s mind. The times he raped his wife, the time he raped his stepdaughter, the times he raped the new Guards recruit, not just one of them but _every_ one of them: the secret price for their admission to the Hard Men’s Club, _everybody does it, come on, prove you’re a man, no advancement in rank for you if you don’t._ Not to mention the threat(if they didn’t cooperate) of being given the worst duties, having their pay docked for endless manufactured misbehaviours… and worst, letting the other Guards think that the new kid had somehow escaped the degradation _they’d_ had to suffer. Which would mean he was something special to the Hard Man, someone who’d get privileges, someone who was going to need taking down a peg or two. Maybe in the same way that had been done to _them—_

—and here too was the time so very long ago when this deed had been done to _him_ , by one of his father’s friends. The awful pain of it, the burning, impotent shame, the intolerable rage that had nowhere to go. All buried now under memories of how he fled his home and groveled and scraped to get into the army and then into the Guard, how he took the worst duties, curried favour and did whatever he had to do to make his way up through the chain of command, to prove he was smarter, meaner, richer, _better_ than the man who’d hurt him, _better_ than the father who hadn’t been smart enough to realize what was happening and save him. 

Yet even all the accomplishments of his adult life, all the power he’d managed to clutch to himself over the bitter years, hadn’t been enough to keep _this_ from happening to him. This impossible shame, this lung-burning, heart-seizing terror. Inescapable now. Choking him, crushing him, making _nothing_ of him in the eyes of those to whom fear should have made him _everything_. He couldn’t even move to attack them as he saw them cease to fear him, couldn’t even find breath for one last scream— 

The shadows drew themselves away from where the afternoon Guard-captain stood, as if themselves disgusted. The ones around Iaon clung close to him and shivered, and he slid his hands down into them for warmth and clenched his fists in them tight. 

The Guard-captain crumpled with a horrible looseness of limb, as if the bones had been sucked out of him, and fell sprawling, empty-eyed, on the glittering floor. There was no need to touch him to know him dead. 

The God turned back to the rest of the guards, his pale eyes burning unusually visible through his shadows, unusually silvery-cold with interest and apparent amusement. And he said just one word: 

“Next?”

Barely one breath later the guardsmen rushed the Queen’s throne in a desperate and disorderly crowd, flung themselves on their faces at the foot of it (though at a terrified and respectful distance from the God), and the babbling began in earnest. 

The God looked down at them with the slightly bemused expression he reserved for events like some experiment gone a bit awry on the sitting-room rug. Iaon, meanwhile, could do nothing but stand there feeling unnerved by how dreadfully the God was _enjoying_ all this. _This is the darker side of his love of justice._ Yes, he was playing it up for effect: but at the same time Iaon couldn’t get rid of the feeling that what he was seeing was rooted in something real, something the God didn’t often express. _Not just ‘not often’: but never before, at least not while I’ve been with him._

“There’s just too little loyalty left in the world,” the God murmured. “Appalling, really, with the world so young yet.” And his gaze came up and slid over to meet Iaon’s. 

And now Iaon felt not just horrified, but vaguely complicit. _This is about what he sees in me and not in others,_ he thought. _I’m being held up in his mind as some kind of ideal to measure other mortals against._

He shivered one more time, and then sought for calm. They were still on duty. He was still needed alert and useful here. But even the fire in the grate back in the House of the Two Hundred Twenty-One Bees was going to take a while to do anything useful about the chill these last few minutes had run into his bones. 

“Well,” the God said, drawing in the shadows about him a little, and looking toward where the priests of Marduk were standing. “Please don’t think all these men are involved in the matter at hand. This man, and this, and this—” and he pointed out three of the enthusiastically self-abasing crowd before the throne— “were working directly with the man presently bemoaning his fate on the wrong side of the River. They will, therefore, have quite a lot to tell you, great Queen, about the men who would have had you and the loyal members of your household killed in their beds. _Won’t you now?”_ the God whispered, bending down over them. 

All the guilty men crouched themselves down small and still and trembling as field mice who’ve felt the hawk’s shadow pass over. 

“Right,” the God said, straightening. “But about the rest of these poor creatures you needn’t overly concern yourself. They didn’t know what was planned. The others never involved them directly, even though some of them would have been on duty and ordered to open the doors in question, then called away afterwards. They’d been chalked up as too honest, and were earmarked to be killed in the aftermath. Interestingly, one of _this_ group is the man responsible for what happened to Pyramus and Thisbe. Night-shift Guards captain, isn’t it? _This_ fellow.” He pointed. “He did what he did out of good old-fashioned fear; so for him, no worse than punishment and purification, I’d think. There’s raw material there that you can’t really afford to throw away at the moment.”

The God glanced over at another Guard. “While this lad _here—”_ The God reached down to one of the youngest of the crowd before the throne and pulled him to his feet by one arm. “Stand up, man, you’re all right. You had misgivings starting from the moment after you said ‘yes’ to the ringleader, but at least you were clever about it. As the day came closer, you were always looking to find a way to tell someone and keep the bad deed from happening, while also not getting killed yourself. And you were also planning that when the hour drew near on the night in question, you’d be out in the privy behind the squad room, claiming to be caught short because you ate something bad that morning… which you were actually planning to _do,_ for maximum believability. This man ought to be put in training as a shift commander: one of these days he’ll make a good Guards Commander himself. Assuming he doesn’t abuse his sick days.” 

The God dusted his shadow-gloved hands. “Meanwhile, great Queen, let the priests of Marduk interview these men at their leisure and write down everything they have to say about the plot against you. As well as everything else these men can think of, the revelation of which may improve the Queen’s safety and that of… Mmm.” 

He broke off suddenly, looked over at Iaon. “Would you say, my Prince, that mortals often take news more seriously if a God delivers it?” 

“Well, it’s the whole idea of oracles, after all,” Iaon said, running his fingers through the shadows around him one last time—they seemed calmer now—and making his way over toward the God. “When one actually appears in front of you and tells you something, yes, it does concentrate the mind somewhat: even in a dream.” He glanced around him. “And maybe even more so in broad daylight…?”

The God smiled. “My perceptive Prince,” he said, and whirled back to face other two Gods. “Lord Marduk… I think it’s time for you to give the mortals some ideas.”

Marduk looked bemused. Argeiphontês put his head close to the thunder-god’s and began murmuring something that made Marduk’s eyebrows go up, and that long low chuckle start again

“One matter remains,” said the Queen, standing up as the priests of Marduk moved in to take the conspirators and the other Guards away. “The unfortunate Pyramus and Thisbe. Notice has already been taken. What shall our people be told? If no official story is quickly forthcoming, they’ll start making up stories themselves. And right now, the truth would be…”

“A bit more destabilizing than would be useful?” the God said, with a glance at Lord Marduk. “I suppose.” 

He turned his attention back to Iaon. A moment later Iaon realized that everyone else was looking at him, too. 

“Well….” He sighed, seeing the necessity. And it wouldn't be the first time that a myth had been made to draw a tasteful veil over some more brutal reality. “Tell them a truth that the facts will support. Or will seem to. Give the poor youth and maiden a grand funeral and proclaim what ‘really happened:’ the tale of how they died tragically for love. Turn the lie the guardsmen tried to tell into a story of how their love and fear for one another, and the accidental intrusion of a passing lioness, led them into a pair of terrible mistakes.”

The Queen nodded. “Perhaps, Prince Iaon,” she said slowly, _“you_ would agree to write down that story as it should properly be told. For as I hear it, it was your stories of the Consulting God’s feats that drew the attention of great Marduk in the first place.”

Iaon blushed hot. “True enough,” Marduk said as he and Hermes left their spot by the wall and ambled over. “That one with the Electrum Crutch? That was a corker. Can’t get my priests to shut up about it.”

Iaon didn’t need to cross any threshold whatsoever to feel the God rolling his eyes expressively inside his shadows. “Uh,” he said, “thank you, mighty God.” He turned his attention back to the Queen. “Well, all right. Then all you’ll need to do afterwards is find some nonfatal punishment for the parents who abused them both.”

“Nonfatal? Why?”

“Because it’s a lot easier to forget about the dead than about the live people turning a big heavy millstone in the heat of the sun in the market square every day,” Iaon said. “Maybe parents passing them by on their way to do the shopping will think a little harder about what might come of beating their kids.” 

The Queen gazed at him for a moment and then did something most unexpected: she half-lowered her lids, and smiled at him. “Prince Iaon,” she said, “I confess to having underestimated you. You are not merely well-spoken and comely, but wise.”

The sheer impact of having a demigoddess’s charms so very purposefully turned on him was like running full tilt into something very hard in the dark. Iaon was hard put to it not to stagger. But in the event he merely held himself straight, and swallowed. “The great Queen is most gracious,” he said with a slight bow, though on the upswing he cocked his eye at her in a relatively impersonal version of the _you-_ behave _-yourself-now_ look he sometimes gave the God. 

Semiramis’s eyes went back to their more normal expression of lazy superiority, and her smile backed down to mere amusement. 

“Yes, well, much as I dislike interrupting this little love fest in aid of an unquestionably sagacious mortal,” the God said, sweeping over toward Iaon and in the process putting himself entirely accidentally between the Prince and the throne in such a way as to clearly add _A mortal who is_ mine _, you silly woman,_ “we have an event to arrange, as teatime beckons. Shall we get on with it?”

***

And so it was that trumpeters were sent to the four great Gates of Babylon and to the top of the golden ziggurat, and the trumpets were blown and the people summoned from their work and play to the heart of the city, where a mighty procession had been ordained to celebrate the arrival of Lord Marduk Himself among mortals. 

And then there was a parade. The details of it were written in clay and then later carven in stone, so that men for many lifetimes thereafter would be able to tell how Lord Marduk went on procession among his people, and with him hand in hand, like a well-beloved daughter, went the great Queen. With great splendour and music of tabours and sistrums and drums and flutes the two made their way to the steps of Marduk’s temple, where the new young High Priest (the old one apparently having abruptly retired, for there were no records of him after) came forth to announce that a son would be born to the Queen, and that son, like King Ninus of glorious memory, was divine. Marduk Himself affirmed that this was so, and Mother and Child-to-be were under his direct protection. And amid the great confusion and excitement, largesse was distributed among the people, a shekel’s weight of gold for every man, woman and child in the great City: and the fountains were made to run with wine (which is generally better for the pipes in fountains than beer), and the Feast of Booths was started several days early. 

If some of the great nobles of the city suddenly dropped out of sight during this period, little attention was paid to such a matter by the populace at large. And if some of the people lining the in-city part of the Way of Processions saw, right at the rear of the glittering array of priests and servants and handmaidens that made its way back to the ziggurat in the afternoon, something that looked like a tall, slender shadow in a long dark cloak, with a shortish soldier in foreign gear walking on one side of it, and on the other, what might have been some kind of minor Palace functionary carrying a stick with a couple of snakes wound around it—well, parades were meant to have strange and wonderful things in them, after all, and maybe these three were the great Queen’s after-dinner entertainment or some such.

“A magician and a snake-charmer,” Argeiphontês growled, much amused. “That’s what they’re saying.”

Iaon, already much restored after the day’s stresses by the general air of unbridled rejoicing, just snickered. 

“And a dwarf,” Argeiphontês added. 

_“Oi!”_

It was Hermes’s turn to snicker now. “Thought you were the one who was saying that no publicity was bad publicity.”

Iaon let out a long breath, knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to call on the Consulting God for any assistance at the moment. Since the important business of the day had been done, the God had for quite a while now totally immersed himself in staring back at the crowds who were staring at him, and happily deducing everyone in sight. “Well,” Iaon said. “Good for the God, certainly. Or at least for the work he did here. That line about ‘ten breaths’ is going to feature in a lot of stories around this town tonight, once the gossip mill really gets going…”

“All to the better,” Hermes said. “It’ll make people that much more eager to give up the plotters’ more deeply buried associates.” 

“True.” But something had been on Iaon’s mind for a while. He looked up toward the head of the returning parade, where to the acclamation of the (already somewhat plastered) multitudes, the Queen (now in a gilded sedan chair) and Lord Marduk were making their way in the great doors of the ziggurat. “Dolios,” Iaon said, “as far as the conspirators go, you could have done what the God did. You read hearts…”

“Not the way _he_ does,” Argeiphontês said. “And without the deduction, we’d never even have got to that point.”

“You have to have known that something besides a couple of kids’ murder was at stake here, though.”

Hermes got that thoughtful look in his brown eyes. “Yes. Maybe better discussed at home, though.” 

Iaon nodded. “But as for the rest of it…”

Argeiphontês shook his head. “It’s more than just reading hearts, with him,” he said, his eyes going to the Consulting God. “He brings something else to it. Something much deeper.”

“Very true,” said the God suddenly, and with complete self-satisfaction. “Always nice to know when that’s appreciated.”

Hermes groaned. “Gonna be sorry tomorrow that you heard me say that, aren’t I?”

“No, of course not, Argeiphontês,” said the God, sounding cheerfully spiky. “You’re sorry about it _right now.”_

“All right,” Iaon said, knowing from experience where this was going, “all right, my gods, not just this minute! Not where the mortals can hear…”

Ahead of them, on the near side of the little moat-bridge, the non-royal part of the procession was taking itself apart, palace staff heading back in to their normal jobs, military personnel and guards heading back to barracks. The two Gods and Iaon headed across the bridge into the great front hall once more as the doors were closed behind them. 

Back in the throne room, Marduk and Queen Semiramis were together on the dais, the Queen in her throne (with both hands behind her, kneading at the small of her back) and Marduk leaning against the side of the throne’s back. Together their heads turned as Argeiphontês and the Consulting God and Iaon made their way down the room to join them. 

“How are we doing?” said Hermes.

“The main conspirators are in custody, except for one who fled,” Marduk said. “We’ll have him shortly. There’s a lot more rooting around to do, though…”

“But what happened today will have softened up the army’s spearshafts right enough,” Iaon said. “Having seen the head of Pantheon walking down the main street arm in arm with the Queen… and a good thunderclap every quarter-hour or so to drive the message home? No man in his right mind will dare get involved in a rebellion at this point, or stay involved in one.”

“So we’re done here, then,” said the God. “Anything else that goes wrong from this point on is common garden-variety politics. _Mortal_ politics, at that.” The disdain in his voice was quite clear. 

“But there is one other thing that remains in danger, O Shadow who Discerns,” said the Queen. 

“I’m sure it’s nothing that concerns—” 

“My city,” said the Queen. “The innocent lives here, the innocent blood that may yet be shed as we winnow out the rest of the guilty lords’ accomplices and their households from those who mean Babylon no harm. If you could just—”

“No.”

“Your gift of reading men’s hearts would be of great use, Consultant,” Marduk said. “If you would consent to remain for just a day or so more—”

“Out of the question,” the God said. 

Very, very softly, Iaon said, “You _like_ cities. And the people in them.” 

Iaon didn’t even have to try to see through those shadows to know what look the God was giving him from inside them. 

“And this one’s far bigger than mine. Simply huge. You saw all those people! Thousands of them. _Tens_ of thousands. Just think how you could amuse yourself in between times.”

The God said nothing: said it quite loudly, even for him. 

Iaon sighed and got ready to give it up as a lost cause. 

That was when the Queen stood up from her throne again.

With surprising grace for someone entering on her third trimester she came down the last steps from the dais and swept over to the God and Hermes and Iaon, stately and leisurely, a whole procession all by herself. And then she knelt down carefully on both knees before the God and lifted her hands to him as a mortal lifts them before a statue or an altar. 

“My dear Ninus taught me this,” she said: “to love his city as he did. Whether a mortal who has passed into the Darkness may yet be brought back to life and then to divinity through men’s belief, who now can certainly say? But here and now, Babylon is all I have left of him, O Shadow who Discerns and Reveals. Help me keep it whole.”

The God stood still, his gaze bent on her, hooded, and said nothing. 

“I beg of you,” that proud Queen said. And she reached up and took off that crown all battlemented with great square-cut tawny diamonds, and held it out to him.

The God didn’t move: just gazed down at her.

Iaon, embarrassed, reached out and took the crown from her, restraining himself from giving the God a look.

The Queen bowed her raven head to the God; then bent and bowed her upper body right down to the floor, all that dark hair pooling over the jewelled tiles at his feet, like an imitation of the God’s own shadows.

The Consulting God was still.

 _Hesitation._ Iaon knew what was causing it: the God’s love of praise, and of the humbling of what he considered overweening pride (that is to say, any pride besides _his_ ), balancing against his desire to reject the idea as just too boring. Gods forbid anyone should get the idea that anything _he_ did was public-spirited. 

Yet Iaon strongly suspected that the God knew perfectly well that the transition here would be as far from boring as possible. He needed, or wanted, only the right excuse to say “yes”. And Iaon had his own thoughts on the matter. He was thinking still of the dreadfully inflexible laws of Babylon, and of the bloodletting—at least some of it most likely unnecessary—that was inevitably going to accompany this transition. _There has to be a way to cushion the effect a little,_ he thought. _And teach them a little about what Justice can look like if it’s humanized a bit…_

Iaon had done all the overt pleading he was going to do. Now he just breathed out and scuffed one sandal against the priceless onyx-and-porphyry tiling, being careful to miss the Queen’s hair. The sound and the motion broke the God’s concentration: his head came around. 

“Mortal politics,” Iaon murmured, gazing down idly at his sandal. “Granted, it’s not very nuanced at the best of times, is it? Like throwing a mouse into a sackful of stoats.” He looked up into the shadows veiling the God’s face. “All the biting and snarling and writhing around… intrigue and backstabbing and treachery and lying and hidden motivations and tangled-up plots…” 

Even through the God’s shadows, Iaon saw the gaze of those silvery eyes come to rest in his, and after a moment, saw how they glinted in reaction to the difference between what Iaon was saying out loud and what he really meant—to the prospect of solving puzzle after puzzle and being praised for it, not just by these clueless mortals but (much more to the point) by Iaon: and to the sure knowledge that Iaon had couched his words just this way to catch the God’s interest… and that Iaon _knew_ he would know. 

Only Iaon saw the calculating and delighted flash of smile through shadow. 

“Welllll…” the God said after a moment, turning away and waving one hand in a great show of languid disinterest. “I suppose we haven’t anything else of any import on this week. Prince?”

Iaon scrunched his face up a little as if thinking. “Nothing comes to mind…”

“Then let it be as you say,” the God said. 

The Queen unbent herself, made as if to stand. Iaon gestured for her to wait, and carefully resettled that glittering crown on her head. _Even heavier than mine. But none of them are light..._ Then he held out both hands to her. She took them, and he carefully helped her up. “I will have rooms made ready for you,” she said.

“Thank you, that won’t be necessary,” said the God; “we’ll sleep best at home. About four hours after dawn tomorrow? Very well. Lord Marduk?”

“Consulting God,” said Marduk, and slowly bowed that great bearded head to him. “Consultant’s Colleague—” And to Iaon as well. 

Iaon bowed back, fairly deeply, for Marduk had had something of a trying morning and he really did feel for him. “Sir,” he said. 

“Argeiphontês?”

“I’ll see you two in the morning before you leave,” said Hermes as Marduk vanished from behind them. 

The God’s hands went to his throat and he undid the Shadowcloak and swirled it around them. “Uh, tomorrow, great Queen…” Iaon said, for he saw that the God wasn’t going to give her as much as another glance; his eyes were all for Iaon. 

She bowed to them as they vanished. 

***

The sun was higher when they reappeared at the pillared end of the path that led up to the door of the House, but afternoon was well along regardless, the shadows lying long. The God slid the Cloak from around them and draped it over his arm as Iaon sighed at the sight of the place; at the thought of his own chair, and their own couch, and time and peace to think about the day, because it had been genuinely— 

“Iaon.”

“Hm? Sorry.”

The God reached out to the base of Iaon’s throat with both hands, took hold of the edge of the padded tunic that Iaon wore under his breastplate, and tugged it up into its right position (it had worked its way downward during the exertions of the day, as it always seemed to do). “My Prince,” the God said after a moment, resting his hands on either side of Iaon’s throat, stroking his jaw on both sides with his thumbs. “Normally it’s more as if you bring some outer light to bear on some aspect of a case. As if you conduct it there. But today… today _you_ shone.”

“Uh. I’m glad,” Iaon said, and smiled. “Thank you.” The praise warmed him. Such didn’t come lightly from the God when he was about the Work. 

“But I think…” The God dropped his hands, sounded uneasy. “I think perhaps you had some trouble, too.”

Iaon rubbed his face. “Uh,” he said. “Yes, maybe a little.”

“And that was my fault.”

Iaon peered up into those shadows in genuine alarm. Such admissions were rarer than the praise, and could be signs of trouble. “My God, if you—”

“I’m sorry, Iaon. I didn’t mean for you to be upset, to be hurt. I didn’t—”

“I know you didn’t. It’s just—”

“I forget sometimes. It’s too easy to fall into the way it was before you. I never had to—” The God sounded on the edge of becoming angry with himself, and that was just unacceptable. “No one else _mattered.”_

“I know.” And that in its own way was troublesome, but Iaon pushed the issue aside and took the God’s hands in his. “But it’s all right. You have all these habits to unlearn. So do I. We’ll talk about it later. Right now you’re all frayed because you need something to eat. You must have mentioned tea at least twice this afternoon! Come on, let’s get inside, let’s relax, it’s been a long day…”

They strolled up the path together, paused by the hive to watch the Bees go in and out. One of them, rising straight from the hive’s landing flat to buzz around the God’s head, veered too close and got caught in his hair. “Some of us just have no patience,” the God murmured as Iaon reached up to fish her out. “Tell her Majesty it’s all fine…”

“We saved Babylon,” Iaon said, holding his finger still until the Bee righted herself and had a few moments to put her wings back in order. “And I think Babylon’s pantheon too?”

“We saved it a bit,” said the God.

Iaon gave him a look. “Only a bit? Even after all _that?”_

“We’re not done yet. Some fine-tuning to be handled over these next few days.” The Bee looked at him, and the God shook his head at her. “No, the prognosis is generally favorable in the medium term. I’ll come down and give her a precis in the morning.”

The Bee flew off as they headed for the dark door and it swung open for them. “Seriously, only ‘generally?’”

“Oh, things’ll go smoothly enough for a while,” the God said as they headed up the stairs. “A millennium or so at least. It won’t last, though. The Queen will overpower all the others, finally, without even trying, because she’ll so perfectly express an archetype that’s been trying to come into being: the apparently-virgin Goddess who bears a mighty Son destined to rule the world. Give it a millennium or so more after she really settles in and this whole region will be littered with heavenly Queens and miraculous Children: you won’t be able to swing a cat without hitting one. Not that you should try that anywhere near Egypt, of course, word is that Sekhmet has a—” 

Iaon’s mouth had dropped open as they reached the top landing. Now he grinned. “Cut it out. And how do you _do_ that?

“What, Iaon?”

He took the Shadowcloak out of the God’s arms, hung it up behind the door. “See the future. _Do_ you see it?” 

The God looked a bit shocked. “Well. No, of course not, not as such, actual prophecy’s more Apollo’s department, after all. It’s just deduction from current trends. Of a very _general_ kind, granted, the accuracy’s never going to be very fine-grained when you’re dealing with so much data, but—”

“No, stop,” Iaon said, and had to laugh as he started undoing the side-straps of his breastplate. “Seriously, are you apologizing for not being able to see the future _well enough?_ Even the Fates can’t do it perfectly. As we’ve seen. Stop putting yourself down! You are amazing, and this is even…” Iaon shook his head, truly at a loss as he pulled the breastplate over his head. “Even more amazing. All right? So just _stop_. Tea?”

The God nodded, apparently temporarily at a loss for words. 

“Ch’inese?”

“I’ll text,” the God said. _“Thalastrae?”_

“Setting the table now!”

***

It was one of those dinners that starts quietly, but gains warmth and mirth as the tension of a day’s work dissipates and the relaxation flows in. Case details were rehashed, personalities mocked more or less genially, minor observations brought up for in-depth discussion. And people, the great stream of people the God had seen along the parade route, were endlessly deduced and dissected, sometimes to uproarious laughter, sometimes (for Iaon at least) to nearly the point of tears: for the God was learning to do more with mortal men than either merely see or observe them. He was gradually starting to learn the art of _feeling_ their hearts as well as reading them. Iaon was well aware of who had inadvertently begun teaching him this, and whose business it now was to keep it from bringing the God pain. _Insofar as that’s possible…_

They eventually wound up on the sofa together as the sitting room went twilit and the fire burned brighter, as the God’s own shadows foregathered in the cozy corners and the lamps on either side of the hearth burned soft. Iaon reclined against the window-side sofa arm, propped on some extra pillows: the God lay pointing the same way, reclining against Iaon’s chest. They sipped on the rest of their wine from dinner, enjoying the stillness, filling in the blanks of the day when some new thought occurred. 

“Something extra for you to keep in mind the next time you go out heart-reading, then.”

“Mmm?”

“Pregnancy.”

“Yes. Your mother’s housemaid wasn’t anywhere near so far along, otherwise I’d have known what was going on with Semiramis right away.”

“So the new brain getting ready to work interferes…”

“All the more so because there’s no new mind as yet. That must develop after. Meanwhile the new brain just buzzes away more and more loudly…” The God yawned. “I’ll know for next time.”

Iaon nodded, leaned back, gazed into the fire for a while. “Semiramis, though…”

“The _nerve_ of that woman,” the God muttered. “I ask you!”

Iaon chuckled. “She’d had kind of a difficult day… she was just trying it on.”

“Let her try it on someone else, then.” It was a growl. 

“All right, enough now! As if she even registers with me.” Iaon spent some moments just stroking the God’s chest through the fine soft purple-dyed linen of his tunic. 

Almost a bit reluctantly, several breaths later the growl remanifested itself into a softer rumble, one of pleasure. Then at last came a sigh. “All right, what about her then?” 

Iaon gazed into the fire, musing. “I keep wondering. Which came first as her heart began to turn? Did she start hating the ones who eventually killed Ninus because they might cheat _her_ of the chance? Or did she first start respecting the man who may even have known what was in her heart but still never tried to stop her… even came to trust her?”

The God tilted back his head against Iaon’s chest. “You’re better suited than I to make that judgment, my Prince.” The God shook his head. “Ambivalence… What do you think?”

Iaon’s glance slipped across the room to one of the corners where the shadows were gathering. _Earlier than usual: the nights are starting to draw in…_ “I’d have to know her better,” he said after a while. “Though it’s not an easy judgment to make, even when you do know someone well. Love changes…”

“Don’t say that, my Prince.” The God sounded unnerved. 

“But it’s a living thing,” Iaon said, stroking his fingers through the God’s hair. “You can’t keep it in a box or a bottle and expect it to stay the same. Think of wine. It gets deeper with time, gets better…”

“Or goes sour.”

Iaon sighed. “Sometimes, yes. Sorry, it was a stupid metaphor.”

“No.” The God sighed too. “This is all just… so new to me.”

“I know, I know. Just… don’t be afraid of the changes. They have to happen, but they don’t have to be bad. We’ll help each other learn them, handle them.”

A chuckle, very deep. “You’re always handling me,” the God said, dark-voiced, wicked. 

Iaon let his hand drift lower; smiled to feel the God shiver as it stroked over more sensitive territory. “Yes I am,” he said. “And while we’re on the subject, one thing in passing. When you’re doing introductions, it’s usual to—”

“Present the far less important one to the far more important one?” the God said, his voice dropping down low. “That’s exactly what I did. Don’t imagine it was an accident.” 

Iaon shook his head, smiling. “You’re incorrigible.”

“Just as well, then,” the God said, “that I almost never require correction.”

Iaon smiled a little dryly as the God put his wine glass aside, stretched, stood. After a moment Iaon did the same, feeling the ache in the bones that comes with a long day on one’s feet. And other aches reasserted themselves as the God glanced around the room, reaching out to drown in shadow the flames of the few lamps that burned. The pallor of the flames as they flickered, veiled by darkness, and were extinguished, reminded the Prince of other scenes that had shifted before their eyes, been masked in shadow and gone out.

“Iaon?” 

He sighed. It was going to have to be dealt with sooner or later. _Might as well be now: if there’s got to be trouble about it, at least he’ll have the night to sulk and get past it._ “My God,” he said. “What you did to that man back there, the Guard-captain…”

The God, silhouetted against the light of the hearth, stood still, a deep darkness in the room. “I did nothing to him that he hadn’t already done to himself,” he said. “In fact, I merely _undid_ something. That man had already long since shouted down the little voice in his head that told him that rape and murder and extortion and simple day-to-day brutality were wrong. He’d inured himself to its whispering, taught himself to ignore it. Deleted it, in a mortal’s poor patchy way. I simply undid the deletion.”

“It was cruel.”

“It was necessary, my Prince. As royalty you know full well that sometimes cruelty is required. For the safety of the realm. To ensure public order. The body politic isn’t a perfect unstained thing, shining and immortal. It gets sores that have to be burnt clean. Cancers that have to be cut out. Otherwise the good dies of the bad.” 

Iaon stood still, head bowed, thinking of his father’s tales of the cleanup after the coup against granddad Ismenos: conspirators and their families exiled, plotters executed. He knew it had to be done; but it made him feel no better. 

There were other issues in play, though. “You killed that man because he wasn’t like me,” he said at last, looking up..

“Yes.”

Iaon blinked. He genuinely hadn’t been expecting _that_ response. 

“Iaon,” said the God, and turned to him, and took him very gently in his arms; almost as if he expected Iaon to try to struggle out of them. “You’ve suffered in your life. I don’t have to be over your threshold, or deducing you, to know that. You’ve known pain and loneliness and wounding. And blind fury, and great fear. You’ve felt the urge toward ruthlessness and the desire not to have to care about what you do. Yet _you_ haven’t become a cruel man or a coward or a man who puts away all feeling for fear of the pain it may bring. _You’ve_ not become callous or afraid to put yourself in danger or angry at those around you who’re sound in body or untroubled by life. You’re still tough and kind and patient despite all the reasons you have _not_ to be. You’ve walked your road and along the way have many times made the decision _not_ to be like that man. Little choices, every day, making one big one. He made _his_ choices, to be what he was, the very same way. So shall I spare his life and so reward him for again and again choosing evil? A mercy which would almost certainly be misunderstood by a mind like that as weakness, by the way.”

“Well—” 

“And don’t forget, his life was already forfeit for this final treachery. His stupidity and his own love of cruelty caught up with him. Living, in the flesh, today he saw no more than what he’ll see, perhaps this very night, when Minos and Rhadamanthos deal with him in the Shades. And what he suffered, on his way to my Godfather’s House, spared the other guilty men the same fate—though by the time Marduk’s priests are through with them, they may wish they’d gone as quickly.”

Iaon let out a breath. “Yes,” he said, and fell silent. 

“So tomorrow morning, when we go back—which was _your_ idea, my Iaon—we’ll start unearthing more men like this, and women too, most likely. Though not quite _this_ bad, one hopes. And though this one act may seem cruel, it’ll make many of those suspects willing to reveal things even _I_ might not be able to dig out of them. Many who having been incriminated in such a plot would normally under Babylonian law simply be put to death, will instead be spared. And that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Iaon said after a moment. “It is.” And with the admission, it was somehow as if a weight fell from him. It might come back, but at least he knew how to shed it again. “Come on,” he said, reaching around to rub the God’s back a bit, “let’s get to our couch. I’m weary, and so are you.”

“I am never,” the God said, _“that_ weary.” And he leaned down to find Iaon’s lips.

***

Events shortly proved that, on this count, as on so many others, the God was right. But shortly thereafter the strains of the day caught up with him. Soon enough the thing happened that Iaon enjoyed all the more because it was so rare: the God, well-loved, worn out and falling asleep in his arms (though even in such circumstances he always seemed to fight it for a while), leaving Iaon with time and peace to lie in the peaceful starlit silence of the Chamber—still magical-seeming for all its dear familiarity—and simply think about what had become of him. 

_And these new developments,_ Iaon thought. _This business of hearing, feeling him deduce._ The chill of it was truly terrible sometimes. And at such times it was only the God’s excitement that made that relentless onslaught of reason tolerable; the God’s pleasure in finding his way to the truth, his pride, his (yes, admit it) near-insufferable smugness, the joy he got out of showing off for Iaon. _Without that… it’s just unbearable._

 _But what if it’s going to be like this all the time? And Gods forbid, what if it gets_ more _difficult, more intense?_ Iaon desperately hoped it wouldn’t. _Because if it does—_

He took a long breath. _No._ The thought of not going out on casework with the God? _Completely unacceptable._ It was far too great a part of what they were to each other. He would always go, no matter the cost to himself—if only to be sure the God was safe, and keep him that way. He’d have to find some better way to armor himself against the negative effects of being around the God’s deduction if things got much worse. 

_But he doesn’t want to hurt me. He’ll help. We’ll work it out._

Iaon sighed, closed his eyes. His thoughts drifted as he dozed. _So many unanswered questions, still._ Would there ever be an end to them? Maybe not. It was just one more part of the way life with the Consulting God went. Never any certainty for what the next day would bring. Unsettling, sometimes: but better far than the old bad times when one day was just like the one before, and it felt like that awful arid sameness was stretching endlessly ahead of Iaon from the present moment until the day he’d eventually die. 

But still… 

_Death’s Godson, yet Murder’s sworn enemy._ It was true, that description: Iaon knew it to his bones. Yet he’d never seriously thought about the question that came next. 

_Why?_

What had _made_ the God this way? It wasn’t just about the challenge of solving seemingly insoluble puzzles. And the God scorned openly the concept that he was actually in _service_ to divine Justice. Iaon knew the scorn to be at least partly fake, and the service happened whether the God openly acknowledged it or not. But still, that attitude was likely enough to be diagnostic of something, if Iaon could only figure out _what_.

And conflicts were emerging, turns of mood that were difficult to reconcile. He looked over at the dark head pillowed against his shoulder and had to restrain an unnerved shiver at the way that velvet voice had sounded just a little while ago, hungry and longing, whispering _now, yes Iaon, want you now,_ and the way it had sounded mere hours before in a shadowy throne room, rich with amusement and malice, whispering _Won't you now?..._

Iaon sighed. Knowing the God’s mind—really knowing it, with all its breadths and depths—was likely to be a lifetime’s work for a mortal. _If such a thing’s even possible for man or deity…_ And it was the depths here that were at issue. Something was definitely going on with his God, and Iaon now had evidence of a reason why that normally supreme confidence might occasionally be seen to slip. His thought went back to that strange shadow glimpsed at the bottom of the God’s soul, deeper than any of his other shadows: the thing the God feared, and did not want to know. 

The very idea itself was bizarre. The God always wanted to know _everything._

 _Except_ this… 

The warm body in his arms stirred and murmured, cuddled closer to him; dark curls brushed under Iaon’s chin as soft lips pressed against his breastbone, relaxing again as the God finally wholly let go of consciousness and drifted toward sleep. Iaon sighed, buried his face in the darkly fragrant hair, breathed in smoke and honey and that faint bitter edge of rue: then closed his eyes against the hazy starlight and let himself drift. 

Just as he slid over the border into sleep, an odd thing happened. Iaon thought he heard, from some distance, a vague muttering, as if of a crowd. He could make out nothing definite in it for a long timeless time. But then, rising above the crowd's susurrus, came the sound of a voice he did not know. It sounded as if it was in another room, speaking to someone else. It held all certainty in it, and a strange brilliance seemed to hang about the words themselves, as if somewhere else, in some air, they hung burning. 

_…a day when we will all be standing over a body… a God’s body; and he will be the one who put it there._

_***_

But the next morning the dream was gone and forgotten, and even if Iaon had felt like having a lie-in to work out why he was feeling a bit unsettled, the two of them had too much other business to allow for any further consideration. 

All told, they were eight days more in Babylon. In that time many a nobleman of that city and empire came to have reason to tremble at being called into Queen Semiramis’s great presence room: not so much due to fear of the Queen as out of dread of the dark man-shaped shadow that stood tall and still beside her throne, and sometimes bent to whisper in the ear of the compact bronze-girt warrior who stood by its side. Sometimes—even more to the watching courtiers’ terror—that shadow would so far unbend itself as to speak aloud, in chill dark tones like all-seeing Night itself given a voice, soft, deep and terrible. Men shivered at the sound, and counted themselves lucky to leave the room under their own power. 

And very occasionally that shadow did more. Once, when a particularly noisy argument broke out amongst a cabal of seven nobles who were trying to incriminate one another as accomplices to one of the three main plotters against the Queen, the shadow flurried up and swept down among those noblemen and told six of them, one after the other and in terrifying and graphic detail, each one’s greatest secret and greatest fear: so that three of them fainted dead away and three more fled as if the Furies were after them. But at the seventh lord the Consulting God simply gazed thoughtfully out of his shadows for several breaths’ time. Then he turned to the Queen and said, in a voice that was _almost_ sad, “This particular mess will clear right up once and for all if you have somebody take this man outside, immediately if not sooner, and introduce him to my Godfather.” 

And this was instantly done. 

When this and other such actions made it clear that those who immediately told the Queen and that shadow the truth were most likely to keep their lives, matters surrounding the investigation sped up considerably. Iaon found it strange, though, that these events seemed not to cause the people of the city to fear them. Word got around, it seemed, that the dark shape who might without warning (when court was out of session) be found slouching on a wall near a streetcorner or hurrying down some little alley or peering in a tavern window, meant no innocent person any harm. He was in fact—so people started telling each other—one of the Kind Dark Ones, an Annunaku of the Sky-by-Night: the Queen’s friend, and the very one whose wisdom brought to light the evil plans of the accursed men who would have killed her and the new baby God yet to be born. And as this information (if that was the word for it) spread, people’s reactions to the God started to change.

They did not kneel, but as the God passed people started pausing what they were doing and raising both hands to him as if in prayer. And once when this happened with maybe fifteen or twenty people together—they were walking through the central market at the time—Iaon felt, more than saw, the God’s eyes widen suddenly.

Iaon nodded to himself. “Worship,” he said under his breath. “A bit of a shock the first time?”

The God’s eyes kept the look of startlement for a few heartbeats, then narrowed again. “As if I care what they think,” he said. But the scorn wasn’t anything like as pronounced as it might have been. 

“It’s not about what they think,” Iaon said, and smiled. “It’s about what they feel.”

“Sentiment,” the God said, holding his head high for all the world as if it didn’t matter. 

“Love’s a sentiment, and you’ve been managing with that all right,” Iaon said softly. “Some worshippers do love their gods, but that’s a place it takes a while to get to. Gratitude’s a sentiment, though. And so’s awe. If the news of what's been going on here gets around, maybe you’d best start working out how to deal with those too…?” 

The God said made no immediate answer. But as they walked on and out, and a more casual group spotted them coming through the market gate and hailed them with the more usual greeting—“Hurrah for the Queen’s Shadow! Hurrah for the Queen’s Dwarf!”—the God quite visibly smirked inside his shadows. 

Iaon stalked along in silence for some moments and then muttered, “People do run to such a damn _height_ around here…”

***

Several more days were occupied with teasing out the furthest-spun strands of the web of conspiracy the three major plotters had woven through the Army and the Babylonian civil service. On the final day even the God felt willing to admit that the work had been moderately enjoyable, and Iaon agreed that they could now leave Babylon with the certainty of a job well done. 

There then remained only one event that would require their attention: the funeral of Pyramus and Thisbe. Iaon found himself regretting his easy agreement to the task the Queen’s flattery had imposed upon him. He regretted it even more after the morning he and the God spent tidying up the last dangling loose end from that case-within-a-case—examining the houses in which the two lovers had lived and from which they’d tried desperately to escape together. 

The two fathers weren’t there. _Possibly off having the shackles forged that’ll fasten them to their nice new millstone,_ Iaon thought. He was perfectly satisfied with that prospect as he and the God examined the pre-crime scenes—two terraced baked mud-brick houses in the poorer western quarter of the city, nearly identical. Each had just four rooms, two front, two back—in each case, one of the two front rooms a workroom for the father, and the one next to it the room where he slept and ate. Behind that was a tiny near-cupboard of a room for the child, along with a back kitchen that was hardly more than a shed—two walls and an angled roof, and a firebricked pit to cook in. 

And the shared wall. Iaon stood there a long while, gazing in silence at the stuccoed mud-brick of it from inside the tiny room that had been Pyramus’s, which shared the wall with Thisbe’s. The love had been born here as friendship: two small children, lonely, overworked, missing their mums (both dead of overwork themselves), keeping desperately quiet to avoid antagonizing their dads (one usually drunken, one never so, but rage does not require the excuse of beer). Finding a way to whisper together, to lessen the pain of the beatings and of the muscles aching from the day’s toil. And slowly, with fear and uncertainty at first, finding they wanted something more than just friendship as their bodies grew and their torments worsened—for they were approaching the age when a child of Babylon might legally leave its parents, and their fathers, though they dearly hated one another, were alike in being determined to wring every last scruple of work out of their chldren first. 

Iaon stood in front of the crack in the wall and imagined the words whispered here, the midnight sleeplessness, the hunger and despair of two souls trapped just inches from one another who so desperately wanted only to be somewhere else together, and in peace. He saw the places along the crack, down close to the floor to avoid notice, where fingers had surreptitiously tried to wear it away enough for them to reach through and touch. He saw the places higher up where the plaster had been faded and worn away by one or another pair of lips pressed to it again and again. Iaon thought, a little, of Arêtë and Speio, and of many another lover in the world nowhere near as lucky as he—divided hearts who desired nothing but to simply be _together,_ though the world or the Fates conspired against them. How long Iaon stood there, he wasn’t sure. But when he came to himself again and found his hands clenching into fists and out of them again, and the God watching him, silent and impassive, in the doorway, he knew it was time to go and do his work on wax rather than on someone’s flesh and bone—which was very much his impulse at the moment. 

He went home with the God that night and sat down in his chair by the hearth and hardly looked up from his writing tablets until well after midnight; until that time just before the first gray hints of dawn are whispered in the sky, when the doors of men’s hearts stand open and Love and Death find it easiest to slip in. All that while the God sat quiet with him in his chair opposite, never speaking, fingers steepled, seeming far away: but Iaon knew otherwise. 

He was grateful for the silent support, and for the lack of interruptions. Iaon knew that if he’d stopped he’d have got unnerved, for a lot more depended on getting this work right than on any casual blog. He’d never done a formal elegy before. And the whole of the elegaic art lay in indulging the pain to help the mourners move through it—purposefully invoking the catharsis of tears so that all the hearers could pass through the grief to a place of hope, or at least acceptance. All Iaon could do while working was remember how he’d felt standing in front of the wall, and try to pour that pain into what he wrote. Now he sat back and read over what he’d done, and felt the stinging of his eyes, and smiled a little crookedly at himself, setting the tablets aside in satisfaction. 

Only then did the God stand up and reach out a hand to him. Iaon got up and took it, and let the God pull him close and just hold him, sharing that experience about which even the greatest artist tends to be terribly shy: tears at his own work. Yet at the same time, he felt something strange. The God in his arms was shivering. 

“Are you all right?” Iaon said after a moment, once he’d got his own blinking and sniffing over with. 

The God nodded. “Bearing in mind what I inflict upon you in what we do,” he said, “it’s only right I learn to bear with what you inflict upon me.” 

After another moment or so Iaon was able to chuckle. “Justice?” he said. 

“Justice,” said the God, leaning his forehead against Iaon’s. “Come, my Prince. A little sleep and a bath, and then we’ll go.”

***

The funeral had to be held out in the fields by the mulberry tree: no other space in the city was big enough to hold such a crowd, drawn as much by the hope of getting a glimpse of the Queen or the strange God who’d descended to her aid as by any interest in the obsequies proper. There was still no sign of the fathers responsible for the deaths of the poor children who’d made the tragic mistake of falling in love with one another. “Protective custody,” the God had called it earlier in the week when he recommended it to the Queen, suggesting that the fickle, easily moved mob might want to take vengeance into their own hands. Iaon had gone along with this idea readily enough, only last night starting to wonder if the mob was really who the God thought those two men might need protection against. At any rate, the funeral went forward, with Semiramis and Marduk’s new High Priest there to officiate on behalf of Gods and men. And when the bodies were burned and the pyre quenched with wine and the bones gathered to rest in one urn together, Iaon stood out before the mourners—half the city, it seemed—and told their tale. 

He was more of a chanter than a singer, really. There’d been neither time nor money available in his youth to spend on giving his voice more than the standard training expected of any nobleman’s son. But Iaon still knew how to get the attention of a large public gathering and speak to it effectively, and had seen enough poets and orators do so in his time. So when he stood up in front of that great throng, they only needed to be called to silence once. And by the middle of the poem, that particular quiet had settled in among them that meant he could relax, for the narrative was taking hold in the listeners’ hearts. 

So Iaon stopped feeling selfconscious and chanted the tale, letting the words sing of how Pyramus and Thisbe did not die in vain, for their tragedy will remind us (if we let it) of how all loves can be young loves, if only we’ll take the time to remember what being young can be like at its best; and how even late loves can be the first love if we let them—the one that matters more than anything, though it come utterly unexpectedly or in some shape we never in our wildest dreams imagined. And by the poem’s end, when the serious sniffling started all around him, Iaon began to think that maybe there might actually have been some good in being kissed by all the Muses one after another, no matter that at the time more than half of them had been more than half plastered. By the end of the formalities he found he was no longer the Queen’s Dwarf, but the Queen’s Poet. And at the funeral feast afterwards in the city’s main square, one after another the Babylonian city people started bringing him stoups of wine, because everyone knew it was good luck to get a poet drunk. Iaon glanced at the God, who merely smiled and rolled his eyes: and Iaon set about making the guests as lucky as possible. 

When the God drew him into the shadows much later, well out of the reach of the torchlight still flickering about the square, and draped his dark cloak around them, Iaon was ready enough to go. “All these people,” he said. “A little weird.”

“You mean having to deal with large crowds after mostly dealing with only a few people at a time, in our line of work?”

Iaon nodded, knowing himself to be well more than halfway into the embrace of Dionysus, and hoping a little fuzzily that the God wouldn’t mind a little very casual two-timing. “Home?”

“With pleasure,” the God said. 

A breath later the noise and singing and press of bodies was gone, replaced by evening coolness, the last tinges of sunset lingering behind Olympus, the stars coming out over the mountain. Iaon breathed in, breathed out, looked around. “The roses are almost done,” he said, a bit sadly. 

“Oh, we have a few weeks more of them yet,” the God said, linking arms with Iaon so he wouldn’t wobble as they made their way up the walk.

“Be strange without the Bees,” Iaon said. “Guess they sleep during the winter, like regular bees? Kind of a shame, that. Think I’ll miss them.” After the efforts of the day, and the business of being the conductor-through-catharsis for so many people, Iaon now found himself filled with a strange low-grade melancholy: not unpleasant, and not something he felt overly inclined to try to dislodge. He would sleep it off. 

“Yes you will,” the God murmured as they went rather slowly up the steps, “and the sooner the better.”

“Did you deduce,” Iaon said, and laughed, “just deduce that? You did. You know something? That is _amazing_. When you do that.”

The God laughed softly as they headed into the sitting room. “Also fantastic,” Iaon added. 

The God didn’t answer immediately. “I know,” Iaon said, “I’ve said that already. In every dialect of Greek imaginable.” It took him an unusually long time to pronounce “imaginable”: he wondered whether someone had lengthened the word while he wasn’t looking. Iaon glanced around, wondering what the God was thinking about. 

That was when he noticed that the little glass window over on the shelf, West Wind’s little picture window, was glowing faintly. “Did you leave this on when we left?” he said, and wandered carefully over to it. 

The God didn’t answer. Iaon squinted at the window. The image in it brightened. 

It showed the gates of his City, earlier that day, and a small party leaving it. A quartet of spearmen, a few women, one walking by herself: a donkey and a pack mule bringing up the rear. 

If the wine had been like a warm lamp lit inside Iaon, that light now went out in him, the fire of it snuffed on the instant. 

“Oh God,” Iaon said, not necessarily to the one standing behind him. “Here she comes.”

It took some moments—too many moments for Iaon’s liking—to feel his lover touching him, his hands resting on Iaon’s shoulders from behind. 

“The next move lies with you,” the God said. 

All of a sudden Iaon’s blood actually felt like it was running cold inside him. All the back of his mind was shouting at him _This is a bad idea, you should_ never _have asked for this, she’s going to come here and what are you going to actually say to her?_ What?? 

But it was just the wine, he knew. Impossible to make sensible decisions when he’d had so much. It was going to have to wait till the morning. He’d know what to do then. 

“Three days, then,” Iaon murmured. “Three days maximum.”

“So it would seem,” the God said. “Come, Iaon.” 

He turned and went down the hallway to the Chamber: and Iaon, suddenly terribly cold inside and badly needing warm arms around him, went after.


	29. Of A House Call In Heaven and Other Preparations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After their return from Babylon and the solution of the complex and unsettling Pyramus and Thisbe murder case, the Consulting God throws a strop, acts as an enabler, and considers the darkness at the bottom of his Mind Palace; while Prince Iaon prepares for his sister's imminent visit by doing a most unusual consult of his own. And the subsequent conciliatory sexytiems are followed by unnerving events...
> 
> _Warnings for counterfeit luxury goods, designer drugs, multiple snakes, unexpected corpses, worship (religious style), even more worship (sexual style), and miraculous events (Gods making tea). And of course: Bees._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **[Chapter notes](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/64238407637/chapter-29-notes-and-links)** on [where Harry's Greek name came from,](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/64238407637/chapter-29-notes-and-links#Arete) why [Greeks always bear gifts,](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/64238407637/chapter-29-notes-and-links#presents) and [what the Physician of the Gods had to do with the first C-section,](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/64238407637/chapter-29-notes-and-links#Aesculapius) are at the [Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com)
> 
> Thanks again to the divine Ivyblossom, β of βs.

When Iaon woke up the next morning he found the God gone.

That by itself was rather strange. Though the God might not actually be on the couch with him when Iaon woke up, he had a way of being nearby, indeed usually very nearby, when Iaon woke: out in the annex to his Mind Palace, perhaps, or just next door in the bath, or on his way back to the Chamber  from the kitchen or elsewhere in the front of the House. But not today.

Iaon rolled over on his stomach and found that he felt a bit unsettled by this change in routine. And he was unsettled in other ways too; his head felt stuffed with wool and his stomach roiled a bit when he moved. But there was something else making him feel strange, something not specifically physical…

It took Iaon a moment’s searching in his head to remember the last thing before they went to their rest. The little glass window. The party setting out from the City, yesterday. Arêtë.

_Oh God._

Because even the phrase “went to their rest” was leaving him a touch uneasy right now. It wasn’t as if the God had been standoffish with him on the couch. He was never that. But sleep took a long time coming for both of them, and for neither of them had it been restful. There was tossing and turning, and once or twice he half-woke to the sound of the God muttering something. That stopped, though, and Iaon, still rather under the influence of all that wine, had gratefully enough fallen asleep again.

He was really feeling the effects of that wine now, as he sat up straight. _This is what comes of drinking almost nothing but vintages from Dionysus_ _’s own reserve,_ Iaon thought, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment against even the dim starlight and breathing out in slight pain. _When people give you_ regular _plonk, the body complains._

He got up, groaning softly. _Especially when they give you_ that much _of it. Oh my God, never again just yet._

Iaon headed into the bath, splashed cold water on his face, squinted in pain at even the small amount of light that was leaking in from the door to the hall, and wondered whether he should actually do himself some of the willow-bark preparation, or save it for something more important and right now just put up with the effects of what he’d brought on himself. _I_ _’ll think about it. Tea first. Maybe._

He wandered into the sitting room and found the God dressed in one of his purple going-out khitons and sitting in his chair, plucking most unmusically at his bowed lyre, his whole posture one hunched scowl. He didn’t look up for some moments. Iaon stood there in the doorway and looked at the light coming through the windows and winced again, worse: judging by the way it fell, it was after noon. “Up long?” he said.

“Some hours,” the God said, his voice dark with annoyance as he reached for one of the pegs on the lyre’s neck, turned it a little, plucked again.

“You went out?”

“Utterly brilliant, Ian,” the God muttered, “I see I needn’t worry for the Work if I opt to take early retirement.” He started turning another of the lyre’s pegs. “That piled-up Babylon paperwork for Argeiphontes. Such a joy. A pity you were in no condition to participate.”

Iaon rubbed his face, thinking guiltily of what chaos the God was capable of wreaking in Hermes’s office when unaccompanied. And even when Iaon was with him, it always put him out of sorts. As far as the God was concerned, paperwork was just another way of saying “You will now be forced to repeat yourself for the benefit of the witless”. 

“You should have got me up.”

“I tried. You didn’t even make it as far as monosyllabic. The price of poetic triumph, I suppose.” The God snorted and dumped the lyre in his chair as he got up out of it. “So glad I was never tempted toward the liberal arts if this is what they reduce their devotees to after the fact. Science may mess up the kitchen on occasion, but at least she leaves one’s _brain_ intact.”

Iaon sighed. “Tea?”

The God, now staring pointedly out the window, didn’t respond.

“Right,” Iaon said softly, and went to fill the kettle and get it going. His stomach was churning. _No food, not just yet. Let the tea settle it._

Though the churning wasn’t entirely due to his hangover. _No point in putting it off till you feel better,_ Iaon thought. _Because you_ _’re not going to feel any better, not about_ this. _In fact this might be the best time to deal with the subject, because you feel like shit already: how much worse can it get?_ “My God—” he said as he got their mugs down.

“Yes, by all means let’s talk about our lovely houseguest-to-be,” the God growled. “I can’t tell you how I’ve been looking forward to this.”

“I have to think what we’re going to do.”

The God’s voice went raspy with annoyance. “There won’t be any ‘we’ in it, Iaon. I will _not_ be any part of these proceedings.”

Iaon hadn’t actually meant to say “we”, but since he’d come here he’d become so used to _everything_ that went on here having a “we” attached to it. _Except, now, this._ And the realization gave him a strange empty feeling in his gut. “What will you do?”

“I’ll be out. Research.”

Iaon’s gut roiled. _You_ _’re driving him out of his own house. That’s completely wrong._

Yet now, without warning, another part of him spoke up, its crankiness matching the God’s. _And how many times has he done that to you? Snapped at you, torn at you while immersed in some case, so that you had to go out to get some air? Maybe now he_ _’ll think a little of how that is for_ you.

Iaon swallowed, trying and failing to find some kind of balance between the two impulses, and feeling ashamed of himself. “Plenty to keep me busy,” the God said, as if he’d never heard the pause that was going to precede Iaon apologizing, “any number of things that require my investigation. But the sun cannot set and find her here, Iaon. While mortal daytrippers are brought to visit on Olympus every now and then, with the exception of special or borderline cases—such as you—official notice is immediately taken of any that overstay their visas by even an hour. We daren’t allow that to happen; the repercussions would be significant. So be very clear on that count.”

“Fine,” Iaon said after a moment. “That’s fine. Doubt I’d be able to handle much more of her than sunrise to sunset, frankly. Not after all this while…” _And the strop she_ _’s more than likely to get into, under the circumstances. The last thing I need is both of you in a foul mood back to back…_ “But I still have to work out what else needs doing. With—” He waved a hand. “Mrs. Hudson, the Thalastrae…”

“Yes, this should be interesting,” the God said, his tone was becoming quite barbed now. “This isn’t going to go down quite like one of the grand visits in the _Odyssey_ , is it? What are you going to do, give her a guided tour of our vast holdings?” He waved a hand around him in languid mockery. “The huge courtyards, the spreading terraces, the mighty hearth in the fabulously decorated Great Room? The painted pillars, the ornate floors?”

Iaon stood there flushing hot, because in this regard the God had a point. The House was smaller even than some houses of quite minor nobles back in the City. What _was_ he going to show her? The sitting room (wood floor, comfortably tatty carpet, tiny hearth, skull on the mantelpiece, strange things hanging framed on the walls, peculiar gadgetry, the occasional harpoon)? The kitchen? Well, yes, that was certainly interesting, but small. And knowing his sister, Iaon suspected she’d sniff at it, considering it servants’ territory—she’d never been fond of even so much housework as a princess was expected to do. The bathroom? Impressive again, in its way, but not exactly any giant marble bath facility with slaves to pour the water and scrub your back. His bedroom? It wasn’t even half the size of his old one back in the Palace—not that Iaon ever slept upstairs anymore: it was just a place to store a few private things and keep his armour racked up. In fact, the only place in the House that was _not_ small was the Chamber, and there was not the slightest chance that he’d be showing her _that_ , even if it was possible.

“And then of course a luxurious bath for the incoming guest, and afterwards a great feast with musicians to entertain….” He looked at Iaon’s face: enough to give him a shadowed glimpse of eyes narrowed in scorn and anger. Iaon’s heart clenched. “No? _Quite._ We’ve got a veritable festival of unfulfilled expectations awaiting us, haven’t we. Or no: _you_ have.” The God whirled away from the window, walked up onto and over the low table by the sofa, and flung himself down onto the cushions.  “So by all means, show her the wonders of the House. And Mrs. Hudson’s flat as well, I suppose. Ooh, maybe she’ll be baking!” He fluttered his hands in the air in mock excitement. “Won’t _that_ be something astonishing for a visitor to see. And perhaps after that, to end on a high note… the _bins._ _”_

The words were a growl of utter spite. Iaon caught himself clenching his fists, and then stopped. These moods came and went for the God, and there was no point in trying to deal with him when he got like this. The kettle boiled. Iaon reached for the teapot, went automatically through the business of putting the tea in and filling it. “Well,” he said, leaving it to steep and going back into the sitting room, “it doesn’t matter. One way or another there are a lot of things to do…”

“What? _Tidy?_ _”_ the God said with utter scorn.

“Well, that, yes, but… She has to be properly welcomed. There has to be a meal. And then there’s got to be a guest-gift—”

The God groaned and flopped over to curl up with his back to the room. “Please, _spare me_ what will doubtless be an endless torrent of banalities.”

“Oh come on now,” Iaon said. “You came visiting out of nowhere and we sent _you_ off with a nice prezzie. Whatever happened to that plate, by the way?”

The God declined to answer. Iaon applied the God’s methods and immediately deduced from his reaction (or lack of it) that the broad ornamented platter in question had either been thrown out, lost somewhere, or destroyed in some disastrous experiment. _I could always ask the Thalastrae_ _… Then again, maybe not. Because odds are that no matter what the answer is, it’ll piss me off._

Iaon let out an exasperated breath. “That was a gorgeous thing, my God. All that gold and enamel! Not to mention it was a genuine Hephaestus—”

_“Wrong.”_

Iaon squeezed his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Now you’re going to tell me it was a forgery.”

“Not a bad one, as such things go,” the God said. “But the provenance was impossible from the outset, he hasn’t done tableware for decades, not since the divorce. That is, not since Mummy Aphrodite insisted that in the settlement _she_ should be given custody of all the—”

“No,” Iaon said, “ _no._ Thank you. Never mind.” He straightened up. “Doesn’t change the fact that it’s the proper thing to do, my God. You _can_ _’t_ let a guest just walk away empty-handed.”

“Yes, well, there are a lot of valuable things in here, so if I were you I’d count the spoons when she leaves,” the God growled. “And why does she need a gift anyway? She’s your _sister_.”

Now it was Iaon’s turn to roll his eyes, though he kept his thoughts to himself as regarded the almost certainly vast chasm of difference between the God’s idea of “valuable” and Arêtë’s. _What_ _’s he expecting her to make off with, for pity’s sake? The aurochs skull? The framed bat?_ “Come on,” he said, “you know perfectly well. The situation’s no different than if we’d both been women and she came visiting me in my new home after I’d been—” Iaon forcibly prevented himself from saying “married,” despite a peculiar little pang that went through his chest at the thought of the word: a sort of physical wish that there was some single word that would describe, just that simply, what it was that they had, or were. 

“Joined in the bonds of respectable civil matrimony, so _boring,_ _”_ the God said. And it was amazing how his voice could somehow hang the word “bonds” scathingly about with ropes and fetters and ponderous chains.

Iaon ignored this for the moment, because he could feel the God looking for an excuse for a much bigger strop, and things were tense enough already. “Regardless. I have to think about this. She doesn’t care about fancy shiny stuff anyway.” Which was good, as the House was admittedly deficient in the normal store of presents for incoming guests that any noble or royal establishment tended to pile up over time: things that were genuinely valuable, given only to the best-liked or best-connected guests, or the less unique and more routine presents that were sometimes passed over lifetimes from house to house (setting everyone up for a good laugh when something casually given to another noble family a generation ago accidentally made its way home again). “There has to be something unique to _here_ that would matter to her a lot more.”

The God merely sniffed a disdainful sniff and said nothing further.

“Right,” Iaon said, “well, I’ll just leave you to it then, shall I?” _‘It’ being you behaving like a divine but very spoiled brat._ He wandered out into the kitchen, poured them both tea, put the God’s mug of it on the table beside him, and took his own down the stairs, intending to sit out on the front doorstep to think.

Behind and above him hovered an angry aching silence, but Iaon turned his mind away from it for the moment. However, as the House’s black door closed behind him and he settled down on the warm white marble step, through the soft bubbling of the little millstone and the humming of the Bees, a sound moved softly at the back of his mind: something he’d only heard once waking, but was increasingly aware of having heard again in his sleep.

Chains. _Something chained up_ _… something chained down._

Iaon shook his head and with an effort turned his mind to his most immediate concerns.

***

It took him the best part of the afternoon to think of something worthwhile. But the Bees’ soft song settled Iaon as the shadows swung across the garden, and finally a possibility began to occur to him. The God had spoken to him briefly of his visit to the Palace and what he’d seen there, especially as regarded Iaon’s father; and what he didn’t say, Iaon had soon enough worked out on his own. Some other physician of the City had been treating the King for his lung trouble—most likely Miki, who as Priest of All Gods had picked up a fair amount of expertise in praying over (and treating) various ailments, and had acquired more from Iaon. But what was clear was that whatever was being done, it wasn’t working particularly well. This was one of a number of issues that had been making a good night’s sleep hard to come by since first seeing the image of Arêtë in that little window.

The thought had come to Iaon more than once: _I live on_ Olympus _. Apollo the Healer lives here!_ Aesculapius _lives here! There must be_ something _I could find out here to help my father!_ But he hadn’t been able to work out where to go with that idea. Get some expert advice and send it home? There was the problem of keeping the message secret, as there had been before. And even when you took care, sometimes material sent through the prophetic network by Westie went astray, or got a bit garbled. _Wouldn_ _’t dare take the chance of that happening with a prescription or a treatment regime. Too dangerous…_

Yet now Arêtë was coming. That opened up all kinds of possibilities… changed everything.

The shadows were starting to lengthen when Iaon went back in. He found the God in his chair by the fire again but this time stretched out long with a lap full of tablets, back in his dressing gown and soft trews and going through some case notes. Iaon sat down in his chair, stretching out too, and spent a few moments looking into the fire, waiting for a bit to feel the other’s gaze on him.

But what happened instead was that a half-full wine glass intruded itself between him and the fire, with the God’s fingers around the stem. Apparently the wine had been sitting on the hearth waiting for him. Iaon reached out and took it, just a little nervous that the scent of the wine would put him off after last night. But he needn’t have worried. A soft autumnal aroma filled the glass, heavy and warm and quietly heartening. Iaon sighed, looked at the shadowed form leaning toward him in the chair opposite, met the uncertain pale eyes in which the firelight was catching a little, through their veiling shadows. “Thank you,” Iaon said, and sipped.

“You should eat,” the God said after a moment.

“Well, so should you.”

“Mmm,” the God said, and fiddled with the tablets in his lap. “I suppose so.”

The conciliatory tone was encouraging. “My God,” Iaon said, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Ah,” the God said, “that’ll be what that grinding noise was outside.” It was a gibe, yes, but the gentleness of it and the pitch of the God’s voice and his general mien all suggested that an apology was in progress: or as close to one as Iaon was going to get, under the circumstances.  

Iaon smiled just a little. It was the first time he’d really felt like doing so all day. “Even if the House had a storehouse piled fuller of gold than Babylon,” he said, “there’d be something it couldn’t buy Arêtë and me. The breath in our father’s lungs…”

The God nodded slowly. “You’re thinking of asking for help from Aesculapius. Or maybe Paeion, if Aesculapius is busy.”

The very thought of actually sitting down to talk with the divine Father of Medicine would have absolutely thrilled Iaon… but he was resisting letting himself feel that thrill without getting some confirmation. “Do you— Do you think you could actually get me a consult?”

The God sighed, stretched… then smiled: Iaon could feel it all over him. “Most likely. They both get busy sometimes, of course, but I suspect one or the other of them could work you in over the next couple days. I certainly talked to Aesculapius on pretty short notice while I was sussing _you_ out. Wound healing issues…”

Iaon thought of the smelly old goatherd, and had to smile more broadly at that. _Such a perfectionist,_ he thought. But a thought occurred to him. “They’re not—since then—I mean, you haven’t—”

“Done anything to annoy either of them? No, Iaon. You’ve kept me far too busy of late.” The silver eyes glinted in amusement.

“But one or the other of them knowing about me being here—that won’t be a problem, will it?”

The God chuckled. “Iaon,” he said, “one of them _invented_ clinical  confidentiality. And the other subscribes. Anyway, I’m sure in your  case they’d consider this a professional courtesy matter. Let me send a text.”

***

And to Iaon’s endless delight, shortly he found himself on the receiving end of a house call from Aesculapius himself, afire with curiosity over the prospect of a new respiratory syndrome to deal with. He arrived looking like a wiry, wise-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired man of middle years with a neatly cropped badger-streaked beard, just a little taller than Iaon and wearing a version of the divine radiance that was most focused and fierce. Looking at him was a little like looking at the sun—but a sun that was obsessed with having the people on whom its light shone get _better_. 

In fact the sitting room became actively brighter while he was in there. “Consultant,” Aesculapius said, going straight over to the God and peering at him through his shadows, “are you well?”

The sense of divine eyes rolling could be felt right across the room. “Quite well, Épios.”

“Oh indeed.” The Healer straightened up, glanced around. “When’s the last time you had a window open in here?”

Iaon burst out laughing, for that was one of the things he was often on at the God about: fresh air and sunshine. The God didn’t resist the fresh air all that violently, though he _would_ sometimes mutter about not wanting to have to use sunscreen inside the House, and Iaon was never quite sure at such times whether he was joking.

“And here’s why he’s put on some weight, I see,” Aesculapius said, turning to Iaon. “Very well done, young physician, and not before time. Always too busy to mind his diet, this one. You have some outpatient work to discuss? Tell me about it.”

Just that quickly it started.  Within moments the two of them were sitting in the kitchen and Iaon was describing his father’s symptoms, and being most incisively questioned on them. They talked and talked and talked, and the sun went down and the shadows crept in and lamps were lit and the Thalastrae brought wine and snacks, and the questions and discussion went on. And during this process Iaon was privileged to behold what he would previously have thought a near-impossible thing: the God wandering away from a technical discussion because it was too specialised to hold his interest. ”Boring,” he murmured as he faded off in the direction of the Chamber. “Why should I keep such stuff in my head when there are experts to consult?” But Iaon realized that he’d just been handed an what would probably be a once-in-a-lifetime acknowledgement of his expertise, as well as possibly the record-holder for the most backhanded compliment he’d ever received.

Having spent a fair while taken up with a range of diagnoses and the various treatments and regimens Iaon had attempted over recent years, the discussion (already far-ranging) turned to possible treatment modalities, including a custom drug-of-choice. It became positively intense when it hit the herbal and compounding-pharmacopeia end of things—for one of the things being an immortal was plainly good for was classifying and categorizing an endlessly expanding range of plants, drugs and simples. Within an hour or so, though, Iaon and the Healer jointly realized they’d reached something of a sticking point: there was nothing else to do but _do_ something. “If your sister’s going to be here in a couple of days,” Aesculapius said, “we’d best not waste time; it’s possible we might hit some hitches at the compounding end. Come on back to the lab with me.”

“Yes, yes of course,” Iaon said, getting up. “Just let me check with the God—”

“Of course.”

Iaon made his way hurriedly back to the Chamber. The God wasn’t there, so Iaon made for the fourth wall of the room, beyond which moonlight poured down, shadow-obscured. He slipped through, eyes closed, waiting for the lighting in the foyer of the God’s Palace of the Mind to adjust to his presence: then went to where the God stood with arms upraised and gesturing as he marshalled the glitter and tumble of the memories associated with the Babylon case into their proper places. “My God—”

“Problem?”

“No. Well, I don’t think so. Aesculapius wants us to go over to his lab. Is that going to be safe? I mean, no one will find out I’m there, will they?”

“Of course not,” the God said, waving a flurry of memories past him. “You needn’t worry about transport—he understands the issue, and he’s used to coming and going unseen. He’ll extend that to you.”

 “Do you mind?” Iaon felt almost giddy with hope, but not so much so that he wanted the God to feel left out of this.

“Mind?” The God lowered his arms, looked at him. “Iaon,” he said, reaching out to take his lover’s head between his hands, “I may not have a father, but I know what yours means to you. Go.” And he drew him close and kissed him.

Iaon slid his arms around the God and hugged him tight. “You give me everything,” he said into his shoulder, breathing in that unique dark scent, slipping his fingers into the soft dark hair and rubbing the God’s scalp gently.

“My Iaon,” the God said in Iaon’s ear. “Go on; you’ve work to do. Don’t keep him waiting.”

Iaon pulled the God’s head down, and kissed him, and went.

***

The last images of the ubiquitous glint and gleam of gold were packed away now, the last memories of the hot blue blaze of that sky folded up, sorted, racked in the spaces set aside for them. The Babylon memories, the many many moments of deduction and revelation, were finally all sorted for the God’s later analysis if desired. It had taken longer than usual, as some of the sorting he’d done while he and Iaon were offsite had to be redone in light of the complexities of the completed project as a whole.

The God smiled to himself just a little in his shadows as he made his way out of the foyer of the Palace of the Mind into his Chamber. There were some of those memories that had been harder to put aside than others. The sidewise flash of Iaon’s eyes, affectionately calculating, conscious that his God knew exactly what he was doing when he said _Intrigue and backstabbing and treachery and lying, hidden motivations and tangled-up plots_ _…_ The look had been layers deep—candor under mock-slyness under a need to get things rightly done under a need for the two of them to be doing those things _together_. It was good-natured mockery and self-deprecation, it was a game, a tease, a call to action; a small cozy locked-room mystery in a single glance, with just the two of them locked together in that room. And the whole interaction gained layers of depth and complexity the more one looked at it, like a fractal. The God came away from even the second-hand memory of it ridiculously warmed. Before Iaon he had never even dared dream of being known and yet still accepted, even liked… much less loved. It was beyond all imaginable dreams of former days, when he’d looked at the prospect of eternity stretching endlessly before him and thought, “Boring.”

And even as matters between them changed and grew more unpredictable and complex, they still became _better_. Iaon was becoming more than he’d ever been: the two of them _together_ were becoming more. They had been like no others, those deductions in Babylon under the tree and before the throne. Now that the stresses of those moments were past, the God could re-examine at his leisure the way he had been able to feel Iaon in his head with him, had felt and seen the conducted light _inside_ him. It had been unnerving at first, yes, unsettling… but nonetheless it was wondrous. _And my Prince saw_ more _. More than it should be possible to see. He observed_ without _seeing. How could he do that, how could he find such certainty without objective data,_ how—? _A mystery yet to be resolved._ And the way Iaon reasoned, when he did it in modes the God understood, was changing too: sharper, more precise. More _direct_ , somehow, as if the prism of him was somehow being polished, as if the conduction of light and truth was gaining clarity. _It_ _’s been difficult for him, as it’s been difficult for me: coping with what this change, this new intimacy between us, is doing. Yet the change is for the better, for both of us. We’ll find our way through._

The prospect of what lay in their joint future still unnerved him, though, in light of what was going on inside Iaon. There were still things he should not know about the God, _could_ not know, _must_ not know, not _ever._ It was part of the reason he had wrapped himself so completely in shadow when Iaon first arrived, as a barrier against the possibility that he might accidentally learn the truth; or as when he’d kissed Iaon’s eyes closed on bringing him first into the Chamber, to make sure that he shouldn’t, by some quirk of the transitional state between the House’s outer and inner realities, see something that wasn’t good for him to see. _And now the care_ _’s more necessary than ever. However it’s been happening, Iaon is more acute now than he was before. Far more so. Who knows what he might come to see in time?_

 _Who knows what he might come to see in_ me?

 _Especially_ _…_ that.

For they were increasingly intimate in ways the God had never imagined. And one part of him _wanted_ that intimacy, wanted ever more of it, didn’t want it ever to stop. It felt so right, so perfect… as if it was a thing preordained, foretold.

But other things had been foretold as well. He’d never cared to access that particular memory much, once he’d come to his adulthood; had very early got into the habit of keeping it well locked down in the dark. For so long he’d convinced himself that it would never actually come to anything. He was too aware, too circumspect, always watching for any sign of such a possibility coming to pass. Then he’d thought Iaon’s arrival and residence might be proof that the danger was past. Indeed, if truth be told, he’d started to let himself believe that even if it _did_ come, Iaon, always so alertly protective of him, would be the first to see it coming: would warn him, help him fend it off. He’d actually started to relax for a while, knowing that for the first time and beyond all possible expectation he now had someone to watch his back, someone who would willingly face that darkness by his side.

But his dreams had lately begun giving that certainty the lie. He had started hearing _that_ voice again, not heard in that mode since earliest childhood; had started once more seeing those words that had been uttered by Apollo in the full of his prophetic power, and which were therefore (so it was said) sure to come true, sooner or later. What Iaon would think when they did—or if he ever saw the awful truth that underlaid them—

But he couldn’t stop it. He could not start shutting Iaon out now. It was too late. _And even if I could, I don_ _’t want to! I don’t want Alone ‘protecting’ me anymore_! Yet if Iaon should somehow come to understand what lay down in that particular depth of him—  Already the God suspected his Prince had been stumbling around in the dark down there, some time while wandering on the far side of the gates of dream. _Inevitable, I suppose._ And if he should find there the complete version of what Apollo had said, in his mode as Lord of Prophecy, would eventually and infallibly come to pass—

He’d actually found himself skating around the subject with Marduk. _It_ _’s dangerous business for Gods to try to kill Gods._ Indeed, it was _the_ most dangerous business. Gods who succeeded in such tended to attract the attention of the heads of their pantheons, suddenly concerned that such a talent might be turned against them by the disaffected—or even that such a secret might be sold for use by others, or its knowledge become widespread. As a result, the party line was that it was impossible to kill a God.

Which was of course ridiculous. Oh, there were ways, all right! Difficult ways: dangerous ones. True, defenses against some of them had been devised. But if anyone could work out a _new_ way to do it, without it being quite so dangerous, maybe even without getting caught… _he_ could.

And that was always the fear, wasn’t it? That prospect had been frightening other Gods since he’d first appeared as a brief blinding light swiftly wrapped about in protective shadow, replete with strange abilities that none of the rest of them could understand.  And the trouble was, when he was bored enough… sometimes he had indeed flirted with the idea of how such a deed could be done. Strictly theoretically, of course. But then Iaon had come, and there’d been no more time for such speculative twaddle. The excitement of what he already _was_ —when put to his proper purpose in life—and what more he was when Iaon was with him, drove all such thoughts away.

Yet here they were again.

 _Death_ _’s Godson,_ Iaon called him with pride and affection, _and Murder_ _’s sworn enemy._ And so the God was. Yet what would Iaon say when he discovered that the God had not only thought about doing murder… but apparently _would_ do it, someday? And he didn’t even know how it was going to happen! _If Apollo were only a_ little _better as a prophet, I could avoid it—_ No point in blaming the great blazing idiot, though. When the future spoke through him, not even Apollo could always control the granularity of the vision.

All of a sudden the God shivered. He was tempted, so tempted to go back into the Chamber, back into the foyer, to the ground floor of his Palace, and summon up the hidden dark stairway that spiraled down and down into the dark: to where that one concept, that one image lay chained. To make sure the chains were fast, the fetters tight.

_No._

But he was there already in thought, as all unbidden the obscure lineaments of the image bound down there in the darkness arose again before the God’s mind. The shadow-veiled shape he couldn’t quite see, and the God himself bowed down over it, kneeling, shuddering with grief and regret. _Impossible. Absolutely ridiculous._ Yet apparently infallibly fated to occur, sooner or later.

 _Some day we_ _’ll all be standing around some god’s body, and he’ll be the one who put it there._

Furious, he banished the image, whirled away and went to stand before the drapes; pushed them aside and looked at his reflection in the window, dark against darkness.

 _Tempted_. He was _so_ tempted to put aside the veil. Iaon wasn’t here, couldn’t come home without him knowing, had no chance of seeing what the God had hidden from him since he came, under the darkness he’d never once put off since then except in the Chamber. Just for a little, to let things be normal again, out here in the open, to shed the one disguise he now didn’t dare let fall. As if to say, _I have no need to fear the light of day, to fear the sun_ _…_

 _No._ A bad idea. Unwise to break the habit so carefully established. Let matters be as they were. Soon enough all this would be over: the sister would be here and gone, dealt with, out of their lives, and the Work could go on as it had been, as it had to. Then the veil would be a minor thing, easy to ignore: not something that he feared would (in the midst of all the other soul-searching his sister’s advent was producing) suddenly make Iaon turn to him, with his new and more acute vision, and say _What_ _’s that_ really _about?_

_…Just a while longer._

He leaned his head against the cool glass of the window, let out a long breath.

 _Oh, Iaon.  If only. To just be who I am,_ all _of who I am, without the hiding, without any fear of hurting you, without dreading that you_ _’ll leave when you learn the truth._

 _…Maybe someday._ Because who, even Apollo, had ever predicted Iaon’s coming at all, or the gorgeous seeming-impossibility of what they’d since become to one another? Who knew, perhaps a time would come when the last veil could be dropped and the God could dare Iaon’s unprotected gaze without fear of the fate lying in the shadows at the core of him. Though under what circumstances that might come to pass… he didn’t even know where to _begin_ imagining. 

 _Hope._ He would have scorned it once. Sneered at it, turned away in his pride. But now, if secretly and a little sadly, he clung to it. _And is that so wrong? Is it really such folly to live in Heaven and wish that life here could be as perfect as mortals think it really is?_

The God breathed out. “Iaon,” he said softly, and leaned there for a long while before finally turning back toward the fire.

 ***

Iaon almost hated to leave the God behind as he and Aesculapius decamped to the Healer’s lab. But they really had exhausted the possibilities at the House, and even if the God was interested, there wouldn’t have been much he could have added to the discussion. “No question he’s a gifted analytical chemist,” Aesculapius said as they headed through his classically beautiful and somewhat spare living space and into his lab, “and if it was toxins or poisons we were working, I’d have him in on this, will he or nill he. In _that_ scholium he’s unquestionably a genius. But this is about disease management… and as regards pathology, he’s usually more interested in taking it apart than putting it together. Unless it’s already strewn all over the landscape, of course.” And the Healer chuckled. “You and I, we’ll do just fine. So let’s get to it.” 

Iaon and the Healer were up all night over their work, though Iaon hardly felt it, immersed as he was in watching the Master of his own art with his sleeves rolled up as he took Iaon’s original work on a remedy for his father and improved upon it (in Iaon’s awed and delighted estimation) a hundredfold. The rush of grinding herbs for Aesculapius himself, or watching the divinity pluck one of his numerous curious and beautiful green-and-gold snakes out from where it was meandering in graceful loops and curves through a fragile forest of rectifying glassware, or coaxing the best out of a cranky still—all the time speaking kindly to his occasionally mulish equipment, as if to some misbehaving tot—it never got old all night.  And all the while the divine Physician kept up as he worked a calm stream-of consciousness patter that was completely unlike the Consulting God’s tight-focused working silence when he was busy at the equipment end of the science of deduction. It was like having ten lifetimes’ worth of expertise poured out at your feet with casual generosity; like a spill of unset jewels, every one glittering and precious, any one of which could save a man’s life.

“Is that swallow-wort ready?”

“Here,” Iaon said, handing Aesculapius the mortar full of tough stringy tubers he’d been working so hard to crush that he’d broken out in a sweat. He was still amazed to have even seen the stuff, let alone been given it to work on. It was rare, growing no closer to the Greeklands than the country of the Syrioi, and the genuine herb was impossible to locate in a market full of overpriced counterfeits. But if it was to be found anywhere, Iaon thought, looking around, it would have been here. One whole wall of that long colonnaded laboratory was completely lined with little drawers, each one containing some kind of herb or drug, many of them ones Iaon had only heard of as legends. “This is so incredible,” he said. “I never thought I’d lay eyes on this stuff. But of course you’d have it.” 

“Well, I’ve had time to do some good collecting,” the Healer said as he took the mortar and scraped it into a bowl on a stand with a lamp under it. “Though having a big pharmacopeia isn’t necessarily a good thing. Where’s that spring water? Thank you.” He dosed the bowl, examined it, added a little more. “I’ve seen it happen that having a large inventory makes people get careless when compounding.” He straightened and went halfway around the table where they were working to spend a moment watching condensate drip out of the liquid boiling in a retort. “You start flailing around and throwing things at a problem that may do nothing at all—they just sound good in theory. Like throwing Gorgon’s blood or moly into everything on the general principle of the thing, it’s just wasteful—”

Iaon’s eyebrows went up.  _“Moly?_ Is that real, sir? I thought it was just a fairy tale.”

“Oh, it’s real all right,” Aesculapius said, smiling slightly as he adjusted the retort to slow the drip, “though the man or God who knows how to use it is too rare.” And without warning Iaon found himself in the middle of a throwaway tutorial on the herb; what it looked like, in leaf, stem, flower, bulb and root; what seasons were best for it and what ones deadliest, what soils and climes it liked and where it wouldn’t grow under any circumstances, what each part of it was good for and how to prepare each one. For the tenth time that night Iaon found himself blessing the God for his insistence that Iaon be able to remember evidence and data, especially from witnesses and suspects, just as it was presented to him: and for his constant drilling in the art of memory, which had gradually taught the Prince how to lay himself open as a sponge to every piece of information that was unfolding itself before him. He had of course been making notes as well, but most of what Aesculapius was telling him was simply sinking deep into him like rain into thirsty earth. 

And when dawn came up, rain was what was on his mind again, as he and the Physician looked up at what Aesculapius held in his hand to let the burgeoning light coming in over the shoulder of Olympus shine through it—a little glass vial of a distillate clear as rainwater that nonetheless smelled sharply of rosemary and aconite and the metallic edge of dittany. Half a hundred other herbs and roots, it seemed, were in it—easily half of them ones Iaon had dearly wished he could have added to his original compoundings, but had never been able to obtain because they grew too far away, or cost too much for even a royal family to afford, or (like moly) were thought to be mythical. Orpine and smallage, elecampane and lungwort of course, and scabious and viper’s bugloss and root-of-scarcity; herbs good against congestion, along with various antitabefactants and leneficators that acted to purge and clear the lungs: they were all in there.

Iaon rubbed his eyes, looked again at the little vial. Surely it was an illusion, just something about the morning light or his poor tired eyes, that made the liquid in it seem to shine a little by itself. “What do you think?” he said. “Is there a chance…?”

“After all the groundwork you did? More than just a chance. Here as everywhere else, Fortune favors the prepared. And the committed.” Aesculapius handed Iaon the vial. “I think we have a shot at a single-course solution, if the rest of your father’s body can keep from fighting what’s going to happen in his lungs. Time and the Fates will tell.” The God of Medicine sighed. “You know I can’t promise anything, Prince Iaon. And there ought to be blind trials. But let’s see what happens.”

Iaon looked up with a gulp of emotion: then knelt on one knee to the wiry and radiant shape. “Master,” he said, “what poor blessing a mortal might give a God: it’s yours.”

“None of that now,” said Aesculapius, reaching down to raise him up. “We’re both serving our Lady Healing: pulling the same cart. The oxen in the harness don’t waste time kneeling to each other, and neither should we. Let me know how things go.”

***

The God was sitting up at the partner desk, scribbling notes on one of his tablets with one hand and writing a glowing text into the air with the other, when he heard the front door swing open. Then, a few seconds later, came Iaon’s footfall on the first of the seventeen steps. 

The God listened as carefully as always to the sound of those footsteps. _Tired. But not upset. Not angry. Enough energy there for hope_ _…_ Not that he usually needed to spend that much time deducing Iaon, these days, unless he purposefully chose to shut him out and fall back on the deductive process to make doubly sure of his perceptions. And tonight had been no different. All through the dark hours, even from right across Olympus, he’d felt the echoes of his Prince’s excitement, always bound down by fear, by the desire not to get his own hopes up, by that eternal urge toward caution and common sense. 

It had been strange (the God thought, as Iaon reached the landing and turned up the second flight) to realize that his Prince, sometimes seemingly the very heart of unbridled sentiment, wasn’t truly so. He habitually passed his emotional reactions through a most rigorous filter, a fine mesh of _is it possible?_ and _what are the odds?_ and _am I crazy to care about this?_ —before moving on to care regardless. There was nonetheless a sort of pre-prepared sigh of sorrow always waiting at the back of his mind, ready to be heaved when something didn’t turn out as projected. It was a mindset secondary to mortality, the God supposed: to human life, endlessly full of disappointments, and (inevitably) subject to the final one from which there was no escape. Yet at no time, it seemed, did Iaon ever give up the twin prospects of caring, or of hoping that the things he cared about would somehow work out for the best. He was in his way as addicted to hope as Pandora had ever been, for all that he sought to rationalize his dosages… 

And there Iaon stood in the door to the sitting room, pausing as if a little uncertain about coming in, afraid to interrupt something. _And this you_ _’ve done to him,_ the God thought, still annoyed with himself in the wake of yesterday’s fit of pique _. When he_ _’s as unsettled as you are, and all for the sake of doing what he sees as right. Idiot,_ idiot _—_

He waved the finished text away, got up straightway, went to his Prince and put his arms around him—saying nothing, merely holding him close. Iaon sagged against him, letting out a long breath as he let his forehead drop against the God’s breastbone. Into the God’s khiton he said, “Did you have breakfast? …Or would it be lunch now, or supper?”

The God smiled down into the soft hair on the top of Iaon’s head. “Whichever you like. I thought I might wait for you. I wasn’t sure how much you might have had to eat, or not had; the Healer does graze a bit while he works.”

Iaon chuckled against the God’s chest, straightened himself. “A bit! And I thought _I_ was enthusiastic about getting people to eat. ‘Iaon, have some cheese.’ ‘Iaon, have a quince comfit. Have two, they’re good for your digestion.’ ‘Iaon, take some bread with your wine—’”

The God looked at him with some surprise. “You were drinking while doing _chemistry?_ _”  
_

Iaon gave the God a dry look, but it was amused. “I don’t think that’ll have hurt the results a single bit,” he said, and reached into one of his tunic’s inner pockets to bring out a slender glass vial about the length of his hand.

The God took it, examined it closely. It didn’t precisely shine, but in the vial’s presence there somehow seemed to be more light in the room than there had been; and all the post-dawn shadows lingering in the corners now craned out to peer curiously at the what the God held. The distillate gleamed with the Healer’s intention, much intensified (the God was sure) by Iaon’s love for his father—which Aesculapius would by no means have disdained using as a therapeutic agent, and had doubtless by his arts channeled into this medicine. “Analysis,” the God murmured, “would doubtless prove most interesting…” He set the vial down on the desk, looking at it a little regretfully. 

“Funny you should mention that,” Iaon said, and went fishing in his pocket again, coming up with a smaller vial this time. “He said you might want a sample to look at… could save everybody some time if another course of treatment’s needed. Might be possible to synthesize it, he said, without having to go through all the crushing and grinding.”

The God smiled as he took the smaller vial, for it was very like the Healer to think of that. In some ways he was as pragmatic as the God himself, though Aesculapius, mindful of his public image as the soul of compassion, was careful to keep that detail out of most deities’ sight—not that such precautions could be concealed from someone who really knew how to observe. Like the God, Épios had a private face that he kept separate from his public one: and there the pragmatism showed most strongly. _Doubtless being hit by lightning out of a clear blue sky will do that to you,_ the God thought, turning the little vial over in his fingers. It was, in its way, a message: _I too can observe, I understand both something of your nature and of the nature of your relationship with this mortal, and you_ _’re not being left out of this process._

“Tea?” the God said.

Iaon gave him one of those raised-eyebrow looks. “You made tea?”

The God put the second vial down by its mate, turning his face away, and nodded.

Despite the extreme rarity of such an event, Iaon made no comment: just went for their mugs. Shortly they settled in their chairs by the fire and sat for some moments just drinking their tea. Iaon looked weary and thoughtful in a way the God had seen before in the middle of difficult cases; less concerned with the deduction end of things, which he knew the God was handling, and more with the God himself and the toll the case was taking on him. _And so rarely, if ever, of how the pressures of it bear down on_ him,the God thought. _The sooner his sister_ _’s been and gone, the better for both of us._

“I’ll be fine, Iaon,” he said. “A day out of the house won’t do me any serious harm: there are a hundred things I’ve been meaning to research offsite,  as you know.”

Iaon’s gaze on him turned briefly and dryly amused, the eyes crinkling a little; his own readability annoyed him sometimes, and the God found that oddly endearing. _Possibly because I sometimes act the same way when he reads me_ _…_

“All right,” Iaon said. “So a day’s fresh air and sunshine won’t hurt you, as the Healer said.” He sighed, rubbed his eyes.    

The God nodded. “Tell me your plan, then.”

Iaon put his mug aside, stretched. “I’ll ask Westie to fetch Arêtë away from the group’s campsite a little before dawn,” Iaon said. “Everyone will be starting to move around and do their personal things; she’ll go off by herself for a little while. That’ll be the moment for him to bear her off.”

The God found himself suppressing the urge to hope that Westie would be in one of his hastier or more thoughtless moods that morning: the image of Iaon’s sister being snatched up off the hillside with her smalls still down about her ankles was already provoking him to a smile that once let out would be impossible to rationalize to anything like Iaon’s satisfaction. So the God held his face most carefully still.

“I just wish there was a way to warn her about this in advance,” Iaon said, stretching and then slumping back in the chair.  “I mean, I hardly noticed, Westie was so gentle with me. And anyway, even if I’d woken up, well, I went up there thinking that there was no telling _what_ was going to happen to me, and I was probably going to die of it.  _She_ won’t be expecting anything of the kind. And when something grabs her and yanks her off the mountainside and up into the air, she’s going to be, well… pretty upset.”

The God opened his mouth to suggest that there was nothing much that could be done about this under the circumstances, but he never had the chance. “You got into my father’s dream,” Iaon said, turning those eyes full of concern on the God. “Is there any chance you could get into hers?”

There was absolutely no place the God desired less to go. _But this is for Iaon. For_ his _sake, not hers, this needs to go as well as it can._ Though his deductive facilities alone, let alone his heart, suggested that even the best possible outcome of this intrusion would be none too good.

“Of course there is,” he said, after what he desperately hoped didn’t seem to Iaon to be too much of a delay.

“Promise me you won’t scare her,” Iaon said.

The God threw him an annoyed glance. “You know me too well,” he growled after a moment.

“Yes I do,” Iaon said, and smiled—rather wickedly, the God thought. “Oh ‘dark and terrible being whom the Gods themselves fear.’”

“You’re never going to let me off the hook for that, are you?” the God said. But he couldn’t help smiling back, though the smile was a bit on the irritable side. There were very few occasions on which Iaon’s increasing cleverness didn’t please him, but this was one of them.

“Not for the foreseeable future,” said Iaon.

“Well?”

“Well,” the God said. “Because you ask it.”

“All right,” Iaon said. “Thank you.” And he sighed. “If she can at last have a hint of what’s going to happen to her, that would be good.”

The God sighed too, a theatrically put-upon sound, and got up to stalk over to the window behind his chair, gazing out at the brightening morning and the flickers of early activity down by the beehive, a little less than in previous weeks, in line with the  cooling weather. “I suppose there might actually be an upside to this,” he said, though he doubted he sounded particularly convinced.

“Oh?”

“Well, you can have her tidy up your shrine when she gets back. It was in such a state when I passed through.”

The Prince gave him an odd look. “What are you talking about? What shrine?”

“Did I not tell you? They were leaving you offerings, Iaon, out by your old mounting block. _Kapanakia_ and laurel and all manner of other half-dead flora…”

Iaon laughed a single-breath laugh down his nose and shook his head. “It won’t last,” he said. “Autumn’s here already, winter’s coming on. With the last of the harvest ready to get in, no one’s going to have time to go out picking _kapanakia_ for the poor Prince that the Gods’ pet monster ate.” And then he smiled that dry half-smile that the God loved so, and cocked an eye at the God in a look that was notably unsentimental. “But if we’re talking about offerings, _you_ _’ve_ got more to worry about in that department than I do.”

“Oh, don’t talk rubbish, Iaon.”

“I wasn’t! You’re becoming more famous, my God. More people are hearing about you. More people believe in you. It’s making you stronger.”

The God was unable to deny that. Even in Babylon it had been noticeable, that influx of energy: indeed, of _power._ It had been a little heady at first until he mastered it and reasserted complete control. 

“But then you’re getting formal worshippers now, too,” said the Prince, “so it shouldn’t really come as a surprise.” 

The God blinked. “What? Where?”

“Babylon, of course. Had a text from Marduk’s new High Priest just before I left the Healer’s: looks like some of the city people got together and asked him for the use of a niche, somewhere they could put up a little altar to the Annunaku of Sight-through-Darkness, the Shadow Who Discerns. Seems you’re being invoked against liars and traducers and malicious gossip.” Iaon chuckled, plainly amused. “And on behalf of those suffering from eye ailments, particularly night blindness.”

“Hmf,” the God said, a null sound meant to hide the fact that he wasn’t entirely sure he liked this. Yes, of course it was in the nature of mortals to worship gods: deities filled a need that mortals seemed to come equipped with. But these people would be worshipping him for the _wrong reasons._ He hadn’t gone to Babylon to save their Queen or do some abstract good or anything of the kind. He’d gone there to solve a puzzle, and he’d done that, and then if Iaon had wanted to do something a little extra, well, the God enjoyed pleasing him, and—

“Only a matter of time before they get together and build you a temple somewhere,” Iaon was saying. “Then you’ll really have hit the big time.”

Not that it was entirely a terrible thought, assuming that someone wanted to worship him for what he actually _did,_ as a God of the newborn Science of Deduction, _that_ wouldn’t be so awful— “Well, and what about you? Any temple to me would certainly entitle _you_ to a little niche somewhere. Why shouldn’t there be a small tasteful statue to the Blogger of the Gods?” Amused at the thought, he glanced over his shoulder to see Iaon’s reaction.

“Pff,” Iaon said, waving the very idea away. “No point in attracting unwanted attention.”

“But you’re doing that already, Iaon.”

His Prince looked at him strangely. “What? Because of the mounting block?” He laughed. “Who’s talking rubbish now?”

The God turned away from the window, feeling something odd coiling in him: doubt. “Iaon,” he said. “Mortals have… let’s just call it an attention span problem. Nothing’s ever good enough for long. Give them a new and interesting story and for a while everything will be fine. But soon enough the bloom will go off the grape. Time goes by and they start looking for things that’re wrong with the tale, or the teller… and then you get a backlash.  Your readers, and those whom your writings might make uneasy, perhaps some priests of other deities who think their thunder’s being stolen—they’ll have no power against _me_ , and they know it. But you’re a mortal, and vulnerable. If those who’re listening to you turn, and it’s likely that eventually they will, it’s _you_ they’ll turn on.”

“A lot of good it’ll do them!” the Prince said. “I’m here. They’re there. It’s not like they can get at me.”

“I certainly hope not,” the God said. “Because love isn’t the only vicious motivator, Iaon. Jealousy comes in _such_ a close second—the envy and hatred of the other because he’s got what you don’t or can’t have. That you’re apparently the mortal favorite of a God, and flaunting the fact…”

“How am I flaunting anything? I’m just telling the truth of what happens, the truth of what we do. What _you_ do. Anyway, they don’t even know my name!”

The God sighed. “True,” he said. “You’re quite right, of course. You know what? Ignore me. Just…” He shook his head, turned back to the window again, frustrated by his own foolishness. _I_ _’m not even sure what I’m warning him of. There’s no_ logic _in it. Just this feeling I can_ _’t shake that something bad is coming. Irrational. Idiotic._

But he was a God, and knew better than to ignore such deep intuitions, even though he loathed them and pretended to reject them. They had meaning, though he hated to acknowledge the fact.

“Stop worrying,” Iaon said from behind him. “I know what’s got you off your game.”

The God froze.

Warm arms slipped around him from behind, and (bizarrely) were no particular comfort. “I know you’re humouring me,” Iaon said into the God’s shoulder. “I know this is incredibly uncomfortable for you. It’s no rose garden for me, either. But it’ll be over soon. She’ll come, she’ll go, I’ll have done what I had to do, and things will get back to normal.”

“Yes,” the God said softly, turning in his Prince’s arms after a moment. “That will be much preferable…”

“To the present state of affairs, yeah,” Iaon said. “And thank you for not saying ‘this stupid thing you’ve insisted on doing.’”

The God drew a deep breath and lowered his face to Iaon’s, putting his mouth to a far better use than would have been served by saying exactly that. “You’re weary,” he said some while later, after the kiss broke. “You need sleep. And anyway, there’s only one thing I’m hungry for right now.”

“Mmm,” Iaon said. And despite an undercurrent of worry over what was yet to come, with his glance over at the vials on the table he straightened slightly, as if some weight had fallen from him. Then he smiled at the God: that half-smile that routinely meant so much more than a whole one. “Me too,” he said. “Starving. Come on.”

***

There was something unusually slow and reflective about the God’s way with Iaon when they lay down together soon after: a deliberateness about his touch, about the press of his lips against Iaon’s throat and nipples and the brushing of them down his belly, the slow sweet stroke of his tongue against Iaon’s cock before he slipped his lips around it and softly sank down. Iaon had already been gasping with hunger and desire for a long delightful while as the God stroked and teased him, his skin burning with painless pleasure everywhere immortal flesh touched mortal. Now the warm wet suction surrounding him, the stroking and swirling of the hot clever tongue, were all informed not just by that sweetly irresistible demand that he surrender himself utterly to the God’s desires, but also to that stately pace—forbidding Iaon to pay any mind to time’s passage, commanding him to stay in the luxuriously leisurely moment.

Iaon lay writhing helplessly in the embrace of slowed time, in the depths of a thick slow bliss that ran like honey down his nerves—ebbing in its flow just long enough every few breaths for him to moan in delight before it started to rise in him again and build toward some new and previously unbearable height. “Oh, my God, my love, please, _please_ _…”_ he whispered Heaven only knew how many times, hardly able anymore even to know what he was begging for. _Have me_ _… take me… let me… please!_ And always the slow soft wicked rumble—in his ear, or in his heart—said nothing but _Soon_ _… perhaps._

That exquisite painless burning enveloped all of Iaon, smouldering at the backs of the eyes whose lids the God had kissed, in the lips the God had nipped and then soothed, licking at Iaon like lascivious flame as the God licked at him, root to tip, and swallowed him again, a long smooth wet-hot pressure. Iaon threw his head back against the couch’s soft pillows but couldn’t find voice for so much as a word. He couldn’t make even a sound as he was pulled in, pulled deep, utterly surrounded. _Oh, please. Please_ _…_

_Soon._

It was a promise, now. The tone was changing: had changed. Iaon’s body clenched with hungry joy, the glad heavy heat in his bollocks going heavier and tightening quickly up against him, his thighs starting to shiver, his belly and chest and neck prickling hot as the ecstasy rose. And then suddenly came the slide outward, the air cool for just a second against his cock, then warm with the wash of the God’s breath over it… followed by the touch of that beautiful firm hand. Those long smooth fingers were strong, their caress irresistible, their very touch a command. They enwrapped him at the root; they squeezed, warm: they stroked upward.

 _Yes._ _Now._

The sweet anguished urgency inside Iaon, built up for so long to such a pitch, simply leapt for joy upward and under those fingers, leapt out of him in an unbearable sweetness of liquid heat: and leapt, and leapt, and leapt. Iaon was struck blind by the sheer staggering pleasure of it, struck deaf as if by a nearby thunderstroke, had no idea even if he was crying out or struck dumb too.  He lay gasping and helpless as the overflow of his ecstasy ran through the God, arched his back and clenched him rigid, triggered his release in turn. Moments later the gorgeous dark weight of him slumped gently down onto Iaon, flushing hot, helpless, gasping too, trembling all over.

All Iaon could manage was to fold his shaking arms around his beloved and clasp him close, his heart thundering in him, the God’s hammering in time. Slowly his senses started coming back to him, and he felt his breath again as it slowed, and he found his voice again. ”Oh, my God…”

“Iaon,” the answer came back, in that deep dark rumble by his ear, all through his chest. “My Iaon…” And then the sound of the God’s breathing, slowing, softening, relaxing into sleep.

Iaon knew he would not be far behind him. As he lay there, finding the rest of his breath, it came slowly to Iaon what had been different between them just now. The God had been making love to him, not as if they had forever—which was very much his usual mode—but as if they _didn_ _’t._ As if this was something that somehow might eventually be kept from happening again.

As if the God was afraid.

The thought ought to have made Iaon shiver with unease. But he had nothing left to shiver with just now, almost no power to think. Exhausted, helpless in the face of the anodyne of bliss, his mind and his body both fell down into darkness together, following close behind the God.

***

That darkness seemed to last a long time. The dreams that slowly crept into Iaon’s awareness in its wake were peculiar and chaotic, strange images melding one into another—odd sounds and sensations, bizarre vistas, unfamiliar places. Even in the depths of dream Iaon found himself thinking, _This is like something the God would see._

And no sooner had that idea crossed his mind than he was in a dark place, and chains rattled, and something away down below him was making a terrible low noise. At first Iaon thought it was the growl of some unseen beast. But then it started sounding more like a moan, like a cry of pain.

 _Ar_ _êtë,_ Iaon thought in the dream. But that was all wrong. He wasn’t afraid of Arêtë, but all around him in the dark air he could feel fear. Not his fear: someone else’s. _The God_ _’s?_

No telling. Iaon started to walk cautiously forward through the darkness, his hands out in front of him, listening hard. This was not like the dimness in the God’s chamber. It was the dead black of starless night, or of a windowless locked room; some still and airless place.

He was moving cautiously, afraid of stumbling. And sure enough, before long his foot hit something, something soft. Iaon stopped dead as the something rebounded into his foot a little.

Something heavy. _Oh no._ He knew that feeling: from the battlefield, from recent cases. Unseen in the pitch-blackness, there was a body on the floor.

Cautiously Iaon knelt down, reached out, felt along what lay there. Not all that heavy a body. _Man? Woman?_ He groped his way to the body’s throat: found no pulse, found the skin smooth, the flesh cooler than it ought to be. _Dead a little while then. Typical: you_ _’re out on a case and you find a corpse you’re not even expecting to._ Feeling further down the body revealed a flat chest, a man’s tackle. _Who are you, you poor sod?_ With care Iaon felt over the body, the arms, trying to see if anywhere he encountered the telltale wetness of blood. _Can_ _’t feel anything. What then? Poison? A blow? No way to tell in these conditions._

“I really wish I had some light,” he muttered.

It was as if the air heard him. Dimly, faintly, like the very earliest light of dawn seen down a long dark hallway, some light began seeping into that space.

And as it did, the fear troubling the air around him began escalating toward a terrible wordless terror. The hair stood up on the back of Iaon’s neck. And then he realized that somebody in the distance was murmuring. The words were maddeningly indistinct. _Likes it_ _…_

The terror in the air grew and grew.  Iaon stood up from the body, held still, listened. _Bored._ _…Body…and he’ll be the one who put it there._

 _No! s_ omeone else cried in anguish. _No! I won_ _’t! I didn’t! Can’t you_ see _what_ _’s going_ on?

Iaon jerked upright on the couch, eyes wide. The dimness around him seemed so bright by comparison. But it wasn’t he who’d cried out. He never did that anymore, not since the God told the House to protect him from his old bad dreams. Instead it was the God who was thrashing from side to side next to him, pushing the shadow-covering away from him like someone trying to get free of bonds. His voice was low, but it was rough with pain. “No—won’t, I can’t, _can_ _’t_ have, wouldn’t _ever—!_ _”_

Iaon knew some of the dangers of waking a man in nightmare, and wasn’t sure how far that knowledge would take him with his God, but he couldn’t just let him lie there struggling and suffering. When the God’s head stilled for a moment Iaon reached over and slipped a hand around the back of his neck, cupping it close and pressing his thumb into that spot behind the ear where a firm touch will often bring a sleeper awake without undue distress.

The distress was already in place, though, the God still jerking in his dream. Iaon leaned down, put his other arm over the God’s chest, not to press but to brace. “My God,” Iaon said down low by his ear, as calmly as he could. “My God, wake up. You’re having a bad dream. Listen to me. Just wake up now.”

The God was gasping with his distress, the breathing ragged. “—No. Not _possible._ _”_ And then, nearly in a whisper but  with terrible emphasis, “I—did— _not!”_

Chills were running down Iaon’s neck and back, but he paid them no mind for the moment. “My God,” he said, no louder but much more firmly, in a commander’s voice, speaking as he would have to some young soldier panicking in the dead-quiet midnight hours before a raid, “hear me now. Hear me, and do as I say. Hear me and _wake._ _”_

—and those eyes flew open, dark in the hazy starlight. The aimless jerking of the God’s body stopped, but only because now he was holding himself as tensely as someone concentrating on staying still, staying hidden from something.

“You’re with me, my God. In your Chamber.” He wasn’t going to say “everything’s all right” because it plainly wasn’t. “Are you awake now?”

A long pause, and then just one movement: a tight nod.

“Come here then.” He gathered the God close, and was shocked when the God’s rigor fell away at last and he clutched Iaon closer still, shivering all over.

“Iaon,” was all the God said. “Oh Iaon.” He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, buried his face in the crook of Iaon’s neck.

Iaon reached up to stroke through that soft hair, rubbing the nape of the God’s neck. It was strung tight with tension. “Here I am. Let it go. I’m with you. I’ve got you.”

A little of the strain went out of those muscles as Iaon rubbed them, but only a little. The God was breathing more slowly now, but there was a terrible purposefulness to it, like the breathing Iaon would have forced on himself after one of his own bad dreams.

“What _was_ that?” he said after a moment. “Would it help to tell me?”

But the God was stiffening in his arms. “No.”

“But what—”

“It was nothing. _Nothing,_ Iaon.” The words had behind them the kind of force a person might use when trying desperately to make himself believe what he’d said was true. And then the God was up off their couch, and away into the bathroom a moment later, and the door slammed shut between them.

Iaon let out a pained breath and debated going in there after him. But it felt wrong. _Forcing him never works. Let him talk in his own time_ _… even if you’ve never heard anything that sounded so little like ‘nothing’ in your life._

Iaon sighed, got up and pulled on his overrobe, and wandered out into the early-afternoon light of the kitchen to make tea. _It_ _’s no surprise he’s like this, I suppose,_ he thought as he gazed a little vacantly at the kettle working its way toward the boil. _Just the stress of this whole business. Between Arêtë, and the leftover stress from the Babylon case…._

But somehow he doubted that was all there was to it. He closed his eyes and went fumbling in his mind among the remaining rags and tatters of the dream he’d had earlier. Darkness. Chains. Chains, rattling and clinking. Holding something down, keeping it captive. And the fear: though not _his_ fear. And someone spoke—

But once again the words were gone. 

 _Once again,_ Iaon realized. _I_ _’ve dreamed this before. But when? I can’t remember…_

He put tea in the teapot and filled it when the kettle boiled, and then stood there and sighed. _No matter. Time to get on with business._

_Though I’m wishing more than ever that there wasn’t any to get on with…_


	30. Of A Night Out Drinking and A Vision Before Dawn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In last-minute preparation for his sister's visit, Prince Iaon has a chat with a windbag and asks a favour of a drinking buddy; while the Consulting God wakes up to the possibilities of a cold case, gets down on his hands and knees, and (at Iaon's request) goes somewhere he'd really rather not.
> 
> (Warnings for Drunkenness, cute blonds, kidnapping, potential high blood sugar, pirates, swag bags, and brand marketing.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to Ivyblossom, the β who is Greata.
> 
> Notes on [pirates](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/64948656468/chapter-30-notes-and-links#pirates) and [that cute guy behind the bar](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/64948656468/chapter-30-notes-and-links#cute) can be found at the [Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/)

There was no question that the God was as conflicted about their incoming visitor as Iaon was, since only a very short time later he was washed and clad and off out of the House with abnormal speed for a consulting deity who had no case on at the moment. Nor had he been forthcoming as to what it was all about. He’d barely looked at Iaon when he’d left, hadn’t even spoken to him; just whirled the Shadowcloak about him and was gone.

_Well. He said he had research to do. An early start then, maybe._

It was all extremely unsettling, but at least it left Iaon time to call in the Thalastrae and make what arrangements needed to be made about tomorrow’s food and how the table should be set and what wines to make ready. His sister liked beef, so maybe a roast would be best. And she had a sweet tooth to rival the God’s when she got going. Well, the God’s tastes ranged a lot further than mere honey along _that_ particular spectrum. Mrs. Hudson had managed to source an extremely potent sweetstuff from further south, something called “sugar”, which the God absolutely doted on and which made him insanely active and insanely irritable by turns if he indulged himself too much. Well, Iaon thought Arete’s manners would be enough to keep her in check when faced with this new delicacy... at least somewhat. There was that amazing delicate spongy high-layered cake with the sweet butter-and-cream business between the layers that Mrs. Hudson had sprung on them a few weeks back: she might go for that. And as for the wines—

Typically, just when he was getting into this part of the planning, that was when Westie would choose to turn up. There was no missing it: the olive leaves from up the mountain that had begun falling downwind into the garden suddenly blew up into a rattling storm that ticked and scratched against the windows. “Right, right…” Iaon said, and went downstairs and outside, as it struck him as a politer way to carry on the conversation (in this particular case) than just shouting out the window.

West Wind was one of those gods who preferred to stay incorporeal, to the point of not even speaking most of the time: if you heard him at all, it was as a sort of windy mutter, exactly the kind of thing you heard in your ears when running hard or driving a chariot at speed. More often you simply gathered what he meant to tell you, as if it was a thought that had come into your head. Now Iaon stood down there on the doorstep, listening with half an ear to the annoyed thunder-hum coming from the hive (the Bees disliked having the local air so stirred up), and explained to Westie what was needed.

“The God’s going to give her some warning, but he can’t be too specific, obviously, so just… be nice to her, all right? You did such a terrific job with me, I wasn’t even mussed. But she won’t be asleep and she’s going to be on edge—”

By way of reply Iaon got a general sense (as his hair got ruffled up, a bit unnecessarily he thought) that Westie had a fair amount of experience at this kind of thing, and if his sister was even half as cute as he’d been, this was going to be a pleasure.

“Well, she is— Well, not _that_ way— Westie, you listen to me now, the last thing she’s going to need this morning is the wind getting creepy with her, especially when she’s however many thousand cubits up in the air! So you mind yourself.”

 _And since when had the West Wind ever been other than the perfect professional when on business? Seriously._ Iaon gathered that he was meant to get a grip.

“Yes, well, fine. And don’t forget, this is all absolutely hush-hush. She mustn’t see where she’s being brought or where she’ll have been on the way back, and no one else can see her either, mortal or divine. So you want to make sure you do the whole wrapping-her-in-an-obscuring-mist thing both inbound and outbound.”

_Stealth mode, yes, thank you very much, the Wind was perfectly capable of handling that, considering that Westie had probably invented the transport-based implementation of the phenomenon._

Iaon rolled his eyes. “Your vocabulary and his, I swear, sometimes there’s absolutely no telling which of you is stealing cool new terms from the other.”

 _Stealing. Hmf._ A passing breeze blew Iaon’s hair completely out of order.

He had to laugh, then. “All right,” Iaon said. “Listen, Westie… thanks so much for this. It’s always a relief to know somebody trustworthy’s on board when there’s something a little dicey needing handled.”

Iaon was given to understand that this wasn’t a problem, not in the slightest, no wonder _he_ was a little on edge too under the circumstances, and by the way, what was the story with that latest blog entry? Was it going to be late or what?

Iaon rubbed his face. “Probably ‘or what’. I’m still figuring out what it’s safe to write about. That whole business got so tangled.”

_Entirely believable. Anyway: picking her up where Iaon had been picked up? Just around dawn? And dropping her where he left Iaon?_

“That’s right.”

Iaon gathered that he was to consider it a done deal, and that his sister would be down by the columns at the end of the path about an hour after dawn, unmussed. And uncreeped.

“Thanks,” Iaon said. Around him the olive leaves whirled again briefly, and then settled; and the thrum of the annoyed Bees in their hive started quieting down again.

Iaon heaved a sigh and went back inside to continue conferring with the Thalastrae about the wines.

There were other matters to be handled as well, but as the afternoon went on, Iaon found himself in something of a state of disconnect. While wrestling with issues like white versus red and resinated versus plain, other parts of his mind found it surreal to be so immersed in household business while there were matters of far more concern hanging over his head and the God’s. In particular, disconnected scenes from that dream kept intruding themselves. The sound of chains, again: and the poor unexplained corpse, dead for who knew what reason… though in both his and the God’s lives, these days, corpses were usually the result of murder.

Iaon wondered if that particular image, and the unease and fear surrounding it, had anything to do with that rush of discomfort he’d felt in Babylon when the new bond between him and the God was running unusually strong—the anguish over the thought of the poor lost souls wandering on the wrong side of the River. It had occurred to him a little while after the fact that his reaction hadn’t been at all typical. He’d wondered if the unease had actually been something of the God’s, their two themes or memories resonating in sympathy with one another. It would suggest that hidden away in the depths of the God’s mind was something that made the thought of those wandering souls painful to him… paired with something that made blood spilt and crying out unheard for justice a source of unusual bitterness. Some loss, some failure. _What is it?_

_And how can I find out what it’s about?_

About most things Iaon would have had no trouble asking the God. But this… there was something about this that warned him off, made him unaccountably twitchy, as if something at the bottom of his own mind was whispering _This would be a bad idea, don’t start in, don’t go there._

He sighed. There was nothing else for him to do now. Everything necessary to prepare for Arete’s arrival was handled. But at the same time, Iaon didn’t feel inclined to wait around for the God to turn up, for who knew when that would happen? And it came to him all of a sudden that except when he and the God had been out on casework, he’d been in the house without a break in routine for the best part of half a month. _I need a break. Need some air. A different kind of air_.

“Ladies?” he said, getting up out of his chair, stretching.

“Did we forget something?” one of the Thalastrae said immediately from right by his elbow. “Do you want to change your mind about the wines?”

He could practically hear one or more of the Thalastrae thinking _…again!_ , and had to restrain a rueful grin. “No,” Iaon said, “nothing like that. Just wanted to let you know I’m going to step out and go down to the Slug. Been quite a while since I’ve been down there. They must be wondering what happened to me.”

“Oh! That’s fine. Thanks for letting us know.”

“If he comes back and wants me, though, text me straightaway, all right?”

“Of course.”

And Iaon went upstairs to get his cool-weather chlamys—because the evenings were starting to get chilly on Olympus—still turning over in his mind the question of the corpse at the bottom of the dream, and the sound of chains.

***

The Taverna of the Slug on the Lettuce was the kind of place that Iaon would have gladly made his local even if it wasn’t, strictly speaking, the only game in town for a mortal in his position. The old sprawling building that housed it lay near Olympus’s foot on the south side, perched on a low spur overlooking the Thessalian foothills as they began their long run down toward the Olympic plain. Its architecture was more in line with the local Akhaian style than the cool classicism of the palaces and courts and temples of the Mount’s heights. A single long whitewashed low-eaved building, a blue-tiled roof, a big shaggy droopy old olive tree in the low-walled front courtyard; rosy limewashed stucco inside and big broad dark-pine beams overhead and rough granite-tiled floors underfoot, with tables large and small and benches long and short scattered down the length of the building between two wide hearths: that was the Slug. Mêthe ran it, Drunkenness herself, always looking a little bloodshot and worse-for-wear, but an excellent hostess regardless.

No one was absolutely sure where the taverna’s name originated. If you asked around, though, consensus suggested that it came of its clientele being composed mostly of those people whose business it was to take the slugs off the lettuces before feeding them to the Gods who were their patrons or employers. The Slug was the home-away-from-home for the divine support staff: the nymphs and godlings and various minor-immortal others who served as cooks and cleaners, valets and handmaidens, grooms and secretaries and PAs and factotums. Though the great Olympians would have been made welcome enough should they turn up (and indeed because no one would have been foolish enough to go out of their way to make them uncomfortable), mostly they drank further up the mountain and left their employees to have someplace of their own.

There were a very few exceptions to the rule, chief of whom was Hermes. He could usually be found down here at least once a week—when the paperwork got too much for him and he needed a break, or when he felt his law enforcement role stifling him and needed to let his bad-boy-and-trickster side out for a run. The regulars didn’t mind. Dolios’s straightforward, no-attitude approach to things and his willingness to judge anyone on their merits rather than their job title made him, to their minds, one of them. Iaon was always glad to sit and drink with him when their visits coincided. It was a pleasure to get to know the God behind the job—the dry humour, the thoughtful worldview, the twisty cunning mind—when the pressure to produce a result (or pry one out of the Consulting God) was off both of them. _Not here at the moment, though,_ Iaon thought. _Pity._

“All right, Dasosarchëidês?” Mêthe said as Iaon wandered up to the broad bar, with its ice sink and deep-sunk holes for amphoriskoi to stand in, and the stacked cups and mixing bowls for group drinking.

“All right, Dionysëidë,” Iaon said, nodding to her. She was one of the Wine God’s several daughters, but as far as Iaon knew the only one to go into the family business. Despite the phenomenon of which she was personification—or maybe patroness—she was always sober behind the bar, and though friendly, always a touch formal: it was patronymics or nothing with her.

“Been out of town, I hear,” Mêthe said.

Iaon grinned. It had originally come as a shock to find that a lot of the regulars were keeping up with his blog entries, but he was used to it now. “Yeah, and good to be back, believe me. I’ve seen enough of foreign parts for a while.”

Mêthe smiled at him. “Usual?”

“Please.”

He turned to lean against the bar, glancing around. It was quiet yet: a little bit early for the evening crowd. The fires were lit, and one of them had the turnspit up, ready to start making the Slug’s signature bar food, “dirty bread”: hot salt bacon sliced off the sizzling flitch and served with bacon dripping and fried onions on soft pita. He’d heard ambrosia praised often enough, but as far as Iaon was concerned, dirty bread was ambrosia enough for him.

“Iaon!”

At just the sound of the voice that was hailing him, Iaon broke into a smile. _The very man,_ Iaon thought. _Well, half-man_. He turned, looked over his shoulder. There, slouched half over his usual table over in the western fireplace-corner, was a middle-aged-looking, shaggy-chested satyr, his curly hair gone salt-and-pepper and the elegant little curled horns bleached by sun and time, with a broad pottery cup and a couple of tablets in front of him.

“Si!”

The grizzled stocky old satyr gestured him over, grinning. Iaon grinned back, turned to Mêthe again. “And one of what Panidês is having, please?” he said. Silenus would want another: he always wanted another.

“Coming right up.”

Iaon smiled, held up a “one moment” finger to Silenus, and turned back to the bar. In retrospect he was still a bit embarrassed at having thought, so long ago, that the dry, droll, purposefully self-satirizing being he’d met soon after first coming to Olympus—indeed the first night he ever drank at the Slug—was just another flunky or PA. Silenus, as it turned out, had had charge of Olympus’s second-newest and second-most-intractable young God practically since he was weaned off the foster-nymph’s breast and formally changed beverages. The satyr had been instructor, kindly disciplinarian, comforter and trusted confidant all through the young Dionysus’s growing-up time.

Now Silenus was personal trainer, events scheduler and road manager to a God in constant demand all over the Aegean for wine festivals, drama competitions (“Are you kidding, he _invented_ drama,” Silenus would mutter, rolling his eyes), religious-mystery performances and other fringe events. The two of them were completely invested in each other and nearly inseparable, the bond between them unbreakable despite their clockwork-regular “fallings-out”. Considering that the events surrounding Dionysus’s birth had practically been designed to ensure a dysfunctional God furious with life and as addicted to rebellion and acting-out as some of his devotees were addicted to alcohol, if the God of the Vine had turned out far better than that—while still being an amusingly loose cannon (assuming you weren’t in its path when it started trundling off downhill)—it was Silenus who deserved the credit.

Iaon’s drink came, delivered by yet another of Mêthe’s rotating pool of young minor gods picking up a little part time work on the side, a good-looking young blond chap. “Double dry red, no resin, fresh water, splash of Aegean on the top?”

“That’s right,” Iaon said. “Ta, mate.”

A second later Mêthe finished mixing Silenus’s wine and brought it over to Iaon. “Cheers,” he said, and slid the usual five obols across the bar-top to her. While the Slug was officially an honour bar, along with most of the patrons Iaon elected to pay for his rounds when they were ordered, as was possibly wise in any establishment where collections of backed-up tabs were routinely handled by the Furies.

Mêthe smiled at him. “Thanking you…”

Iaon took the drinks and made his way carefully off to Silenus’s table. The satyr cocked an assessing eye at him, looking him up and down. “Long time no see!” he said. “Thought you’d defected or something.”

Iaon laughed as he sat down and handed the satyr his cup. “Like there’s a chance in Hell.” They knocked their cups together. _“Khaire.”_

“Cheers to you too.”

Iaon took a long pull off his drink, sighed. It wasn’t that he would ever tire of the God’s wine cellar, which was beyond excellent. But sometimes a man just wanted an old-fashioned bar-style drink of the kind you’d get in some backstreet dive while out on campaign, and at this the Slug excelled. “So what have you been up to?”

Silenus grinned. “Ought to start up a blog like yours so I don’t have to keep repeating myself.”

“Cut it out. You love repeating yourself.”

“Yeah, well. Anyway, _I’d_ wind up writing it, the way I wind up doing everything else for Himself.”

Iaon shook his head. “Lot of work, that, Si…writing, correcting, publishing...”

Silenus snorted. “I’d be bloody well needing a raise first. As if I haven’t needed one all this month.”

“Uh oh, I know that sound.” Iaon also knew the look of a story waiting to be told and was only too happy to prod Silenus into it, as his storytelling was always amusing if not downright hilarious. He was strictly a prose stylist, but a gifted one. “What’s he done _now?”_

“Would you believe got himself kidnapped?”

Iaon gave the satyr a look of dry amusement, as this was something that had happened to him a few times since he and the God went into partnership. Too many beings or entities got it into their heads that Iaon, as a mortal, would be the weak link in their dynamic, and an easy prey. He had been pleased to be able to disabuse all of them of that impression, at least so far. “Thought that was mostly my kind of problem. But _how_ the Hell…?”

“You know his little ways, you’ve heard enough on the subject from me. Always sneaking away from security. His favorite game: never being where he ought to be, or only turning up there by surprise. We were down in Naxos for that big wine festival a fortnight ago, you know the one? Brilliant warm autumn weather, lovely big open site down near the Irakleion side of the island, Mathematics only knows how many people in tents or just sleeping rough in cloaks and throws, drinking and singing all day, drinking and dancing and screwing all night…”

“Sounds pretty much like the usual way those go.”

“Yeah, well, it went real well until it didn’t. Last day that he had performances scheduled, he acted all sweet and quiet till I was offsite dealing with the gate. Then what does he do but ups and ditches his handlers—”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes! Sure, after a few days of being on stage, he always starts to unravel around the edges a little. If we’re lucky, he just trashes something, or manipulates the groupies into doing it for him. Hey, we budget for it, apologise afterwards, everything’s smooth. But this time he was having one of those back-to-nature days he gets every now and then when we’re touring and there’ve been too many cities one after another: this oh-civilisation-is-too-much-for-me,-I-need-to-get-away-from-it-all thing. Like the civilisation isn’t financing all his nice new temples. Nope, off he went, out of that lovely villa where he was supposed to be relaxing, all chock full of the amenities—”

“And Maenads, I bet—”

“When has it ever been otherwise? Even when he was in diapers he had nymphs lining up to change them. He pulls without even trying. Is it the charisma? Is it the looks? Don’t ask me, I just wish I was even a couple _centuries_ younger! And didn’t have all these grey hairs he’s given me. The offers I get, Iaon, it would horrify you! But I will _not_ rob cradles, dammit, I know what everybody says about satyrs but you have to draw the line _somewhere_.” Silenus rolled his eyes. “Anyway, off he goes out into the lovely countryside. You know how he is about the Wild Places Of The World, the Untrammeled Wilderness, blah de blah de blah. Wanders about a while until he finds himself up on some scenic headland overlooking the Aegean, clear down by Pirgaki or some such godsforsaken place. Just sheep and goats on the hillsides and nary a beach bar in sight. There he stands brooding for daddy Zeus only knows how long, gazing mournfully out over the unvintaged sea and pondering the Ineffable Anguish of Existence the way he does. Looking like something out of a wall fresco, with that long dark hair of his blowing in the breeze and all dressed up like a prince.” Silenus cocked an amused eye at Iaon’s workaday linen-canvas tunic. “Present company excepted—”

“And glad of it, thanks very much.”

Silenus chuckled. “And who should come along but a ship full of Tyrrhenian pirates—”

“Damn it all, those waters are _not_ well enough patrolled,” Iaon muttered. Not that there was any chance of the situation changing. Getting the governments of small fiercely independent Greek city-states to agree on anything was like herding cats at a crossroads, except that cats by comparison were way more organized and cooperative. As a result, raider ships and slavers wandered over into the Isles whenever they had a mind. By the time any decent response to them could be mustered, they were usually halfway back to Italy already with whatever human or other loot they’d snagged on their little shopping trip. “It’s a bloody disgrace.”

“Too true. And what do they see but this pretty purple-wrapped specimen up there all by his lonesome, and they think, ‘Aha, ransom fodder! Or at the very least if nobody wants to cough up for the stupid kid after we snatch him, we can sell him off somewhere at a big fat premium. Everybody likes a nice well-bred slave.’”

“And no sooner seen than stolen…”

“You’ve got it. They beach their ship and run right up there and seize the lad, then drag him on board and put out to sea again. And he just goes along with this, because now he’s slid into one of his oh-so-pliant passive-aggressive moods.” Silenus gave Iaon a look that suggested this was both very bad news and subject to change without notice. “But one of the guys on the ship, the helmsman, notices there’s something fishy about this soft-looking young customer. When they try to tie him up so he won’t throw himself overboard or try anything else cute, the ropes won’t stay on him. They just fall right off, and he sits there not moving a muscle, just smiling at everybody.”

“Unnerving,” Iaon said.

“Well so it should have been!” Silenus had a long pull of his wine. “You or any halfway _sane_ mortal, in short anybody who’s not simply an _idiot_ , you’d know right then to back off. But the helmsman’s the only one getting the message. ‘Guys,’ he says to the captain and the other pirates when the ropes undo themselves for like the third or fourth times, ‘don’t you see what’s happening here? We’re screwed! This isn’t some wandering prince, this is some _God_ we’ve snagged by mistake, Poseidon or Apollo in disguise, or Zeus for all we know, out on a hospitality check! We need to apologize to him right this minute and put him back where we found him and sort out some kind of sacrifice, maybe he’ll forgive us!’ But the captain—one of these hard-man types—” Silenus shook his head. “He yells at his helmsman, ‘Look, if you don’t have the stones to do your job any more, just go hoist a sail or something. Those of us who still have our dicks fastened on will take care of this girly-guy. Only thing he’s getting from _us_ is a nice high-class master in Egypt or Cyprus or points east. Or else we’ll just torture him a bit to find out how well heeled his family is, and who’s got the most dosh to ransom him with...”

“Oh God,” Iaon said, putting his cup down and covering his eyes with one hand. _“Doomed.”_

“Just wait for it. So they get the mainsail hoisted, fine, and the wind fills it… but no sooner do they start making a little way than the ship just stops dead in the water. Then all of a sudden the decks of the boat are all running with wine, and the yards have sprouted vine leaves and huge bunches of grapes are hanging down on the sails, and there’s this great monster of an ivy bush growing up out of the deck and twining around the mainmast, all flowers and berries. And when those of the crew who now, _finally_ , start to cop on, turn around to throw themselves on their faces in front of their captive—they find that he’s nowhere to be seen, but there _is_ a bloody great lion standing there in the bows where he’d been, roaring his head off at them. And amidships there’s this ravening bear wandering around as well, don’t even _ask_ me what brought the bear on, I have no idea.”

Iaon shook his head, had a drink. “Whatever else you might say about him,” Iaon said, “you’ve got to give him this, he’s a showman.”

“I’ll tell the world,” Silenus said. “When he lets the special effects off the leash, there’s just _no_ one to match him. Anyway, about half these pirates then go running over to the helmsman, thinking he might be able to save them somehow. But when the lion jumps on the pirate captain and pulls his head off, this seems rather less likely. After that, the ship’s company correctly realizing that they are fucked beyond all possible recall, all of them but the helmsman throw themselves overboard.”

“Poor stupid sods,” Iaon said. Anyone crazy enough to have threatened a God with torture would normally at this point count themselves lucky merely to be eaten by sharks.

“Yeah, well, he was in a good mood that day, after blowing off a little steam, so they got turned into dolphins, is all. Didn’t do anything to the helmsman: just got him to beach the ship and then brought him back to the villa afterwards. He’s a good bloke; God knows how he got tangled up with a bunch like that. We’re training him as a roadie. But dear Cronion’s name! what a turn Himself gave me.” Silenus finished his cup, looked at it thoughtfully. “My turn. Same again?”

“Please.”

Silenus pushed his bench back and went off with the empties, quick and light on his goat’s feet—always surprisingly so, for someone a bit on the bulky side. Iaon sat there with his elbows up on the table, fingers interlaced, his chin resting on them a moment, and gazed around him as the room slowly started to fill with beings of what once upon a time Iaon would have considered a dazzling and intimidating beauty.

 _But the bar’s been raised a bit since then._ Iaon’s smile went a bit softer, more private. Even though he had only seen his lover in near-darkness, or indistinctly through his shadow-veiling by day, Iaon knew what his hands told him. The God’s physical beauty was a gift far beyond any deserving or possible expectation of Iaon’s, sometimes nearly unbelievable to him. But their relationship—the security and satisfaction of it—had left Iaon in a place where he could appreciate others’ beauty without guilt. And on Olympus this was an enjoyable advantage, nearly a luxury. The minor deities who patronized the Slug were not as staggeringly beautiful as, say, Aphrodite or Athena or the Muses had been, those great ones’ looks being in some way just another expression of their power. But the looks of the various oreads and dryads and nature-godlings and whatnot had less of an edge about them, and Iaon felt more relaxed about enjoying them as he enjoyed their company—casually and without overmuch concern, for everyone knew he was thoroughly spoken for in more ways than one.

He watched Silenus come ambling back, having claimed their drinks from the handsome young blond gent behind the bar. “You haven’t blogged a word about this last thing,” Silenus said as he settled himself down again and handed Iaon his new drink. “Whatever it was about that kept you the guts of a fortnight in Babylon.”

Iaon raised his eyebrows, amused. Gossip on Olympus was as unstoppable a force as it was anywhere else in Heaven or Earth or the Realms Between, and the fact that its patron Goddess lived just up the hill didn’t help. “Don’t know that I can,” he said. “It was all kind of sensitive. Some of the stuff would cause way too much trouble if it got out into the world.”

“That queen they’ve got out there, though…” He waggled his eyebrows at Iaon.

Iaon shook his head. “What a piece of work.”

“So it’s said. She take a dive at you along the way?”

Iaon snorted. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Didn’t hear it. Suspected it, though,” the satyr said. “Classic splitting technique, Iaon my lad; beloved of manipulators and power-trippers everywhere. The Consulting God’s impervious, it’s widely known. Doubt she cared much for that. So what then? Can’t get at the principal? Get at his partner. Stick the knife in that way.”

Iaon nodded. “Yeah, that’s something of an occupational hazard...”

“Heard you got into a little performance art as well. Any chance we could get you out for one of the theatre festivals?”

“Oh please,” Iaon said, “I don’t think so. My aching head!”

He spent a little while then telling Silenus about Babylon: sharing with him at least some of the things that even if he did wind up writing a blog entry, would never make it into the text. Partly Iaon went ahead because he knew this stuff was safe with Silenus, who might seem at first glance like a gossip but who would be silent as the grave about whatever you told him, if you asked him to. But it was also just for the comfort of being able to chat over a drink in a comfortable place, to do something normal. _Though considering this normal,_ he thought, glancing around the room as he paused for a sip of his drink, _is in itself kind of funny._ And as a bonus, Silenus’s job left him perfectly positioned to comprehend Iaon’s. He could understand from the inside the philosophical commitment to a shared Work, and not automatically assume it was all about the emotional side of the relationship. At any rate, Iaon was surprised to look down into his cup, after what had seemed a very short time, and find it empty again. “Gods, where’d that go? And me sitting here bending your ear half off.”

Silenus guffawed, flicked one of them. “That’ll take some doing, Iaon.”

Iaon laughed too. “My turn. Same again?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

The first couple of drinks were weighing on Iaon a bit, so he meant to just head by the bar and out to the privy—the management of the Slug being houseproud enough to insist on having one. But as he was passing the bar, the young good-looking blond chap glanced up from ladling wine into somebody’s cup and caught his eye. “All right, Dasosarchëidês?”

“Sure, just need to get another round in.” Iaon paused, realizing what had tweaked his interest earlier—something initially heard as background, but more noticeable now. “Pardon me for asking, but where’d you get that accent?”

The young gent grinned, flashing perfect white teeth at him. “Well, as far as that goes, where’d you get yours?”

And they both laughed, mostly because everybody up here seemed to expect Iaon to sound very regional, and it was rare for Gods to sound quite so much that way. Life in Olympus seemed to average the Gods’ accents out and submerge them into a sort of Received Posh sound—the Consulting God’s own accent being perhaps the purest form of this that Iaon had heard so far, but with all his Mummies being who they were, this was probably no surprise. “Take a guess,” Iaon said, for some reason rather taken with the other’s clear grey eyes.

“Akhaia?”

“Right. Lycia?”

“Right.”

“Work-related?” Iaon said. From the look of him and the fairly subdued godlight, he thought the lad might be a woodland godling, a he-dryad or something similar.

“Well, originally—”

Just then Mêthe came around the corner of the bar. “They’re going to be needing another chunk of bacon shortly,” she was saying, not looking up from the tray of full cups she was carefully carrying. “Would you go see to that, lovey?” As she put the tray down the registered him. “Oh, Dasosarchëidês. Ready for another?”

“I’ve got it, boss,” said the young man. “Dry red twice with Pierian spring and a seawater shot for the Prince, Lemnian old growth triple dry with Aegean at the bottom and a shot of pomegranate for Panidês.”

“Perfect,” Iaon said. “Back in two shakes.”

He went out, relieved himself, and then came back in while the blond was mixing their drinks. Before he quite knew what had happened he’d got into a discussion of upland boar hunting in the mountain range that terminated in Aroania. He spent a little while being amused by the barman’s enthusiasm, while (in as circumspect a manner as he could manage) taking a little time to admire the godling’s looks. There was something about the cast of his face that reminded Iaon of the Consulting God, though otherwise they weren’t that alike: something about the tilt of the eyes, not as acute as the God’s, but the kind of gaze that pleased you when it lingered. Yet it was also a characterful face, neither vapidly pretty nor so classically handsome that there was nothing about it but perfect symmetry. _And here I am staring. Cut it out, Iaon._

 _“Aiai,”_ the godling said, pausing in mid-flow of a discussion of wild boar habits to peer into the pouring jug he’d just picked up. “Gone right through the pomegranate syrup. Need to fetch a fresh one from the cellar. No no! Just leave those here with me and I’ll fetch them over.”

“Thanks much.” Iaon put down money for the round on the counter, added an extra couple of obols for the young barman. “Hey, have a drink on me when you go off.”

“Ta, will do! Cheers to you.”

“Cheers, mate.”

Iaon made his way back to their table, cheerfully self-justifying the tip on the grounds that it was only smart to be on friendly terms with all the bar staff—and Heaven knew he liked to be seen as appreciating it when they went to a little extra trouble. “Drinks are coming,” he said as he sat down. “They ran out of your shot.”

“I keep telling them they need to keep a bigger bucket of that stuff behind the bar.”

“For you they need a bigger bucket of _everything.”_

Silenus chuckled. “Got a reputation to maintain.”

“Heaven forbid I should interfere with that.” Iaon folded his hands on the table. “Si, I’ve got a favour to ask of you.”

“What? Name it!” Silenus said. “Not likely the boss’d forget how the Consulting God cleared up the loose ends of Lady Ariadne’s desertion case. Neither will I. Ugly, _ugly_ business! Would’ve dragged on for half of forever without him. Whatever we can do for his partner is the _very_ least we can do. And anyway, it’s _you_ , Iaon: when do you ever ask for anything? Say what you want and consider it done, assuming it’s doable.”

“I was wondering…” Now that he was right down to it, Iaon felt a little embarrassed: not least by not having thought of this a lot sooner. “My sister’s visiting in the morning. She’s a Maenad. Any chance I could get her an amphoriska of something Himself has blessed?”

“Why not? Autographed, if you like. We got some classy new redware stock in for Naxos, very choice, it moved like crazy with the fans last week.”

“Here you go,” said the Lycian-sounding voice as the young God from behind the bar came along with their drinks. “Yours, Prince Iaon—and yours, oh most favoured and most senior devotee of great Bromios—”

“I _told_ you I’d get you those tickets, Medeon!” said Silenus, with a mock-put-upon look. “Don’t spread it on so thick; you won’t have any left for next time.”

Medeon grinned at them both and took himself away. “So one of the commemorative jugs,” Silenus said to Iaon. “No problem at all. Any particular type?”

Iaon restrained himself from the easy answer, which was that it was simpler to try to list the types of wine Arete _didn’t_ like. “Uh, she favours red, mostly. With resin.”

Silenus chuckled. “That’s a real Bacchante for you, doesn’t want to take a chance on the stuff going off in transit. Very old school.” He reached for the topmost of his tablets, made a note. “You sure she wouldn’t like something more than just what would come in a swag bag? Not a personal appearance? Or an apparition, anyway.”

Iaon blinked. “What, tomorrow? Kind of short notice, surely?”

“Well, you know—” Then Silenus stopped, scrunched up his forehead. “No, wait, he’s got something else on, doesn’t he.” The satyr pulled out the tablet underneath the one where he’d just made a note, read down it and blew out an annoyed breath. “Dammit, sorry, Iaon. He’s stuck down in Crete. First day of a mystery weekend, he’s got to be there all day for the induction phase. A lot of screaming and yelling and angst, but if he’s not there doing the mystagogue thing, all the applicants get freaked out.”

“Hey, it was a last-minute idea. Don’t worry about it.” And Iaon had to smile, because this was so typical of Silenus, always generous to a fault.

“No problem. Leave it with me, though, and I’ll find a hole in his schedule sometime in the next little while. Festival season’s winding down now ahead of the change in the weather; he’ll have more free time.”

“Thanks very much. She’ll really appreciate it.” And Iaon grinned. “I’d better not tell her about this in advance, though. She’ll start ragging me. ‘He’s a God, why can’t he be two places at once if he wants to?’ ‘A God can do anything,’ that’s always been her line…”

“Please,” Silenus said, grimacing. “The last thing we need. If mine develops omnipresence, my job gets _way_ harder than it is already.”

Iaon thought what it would be like if the Consulting God could be everywhere at once, and chuckled. “Yeah, let’s not and say we did.”

And then the air next to their table started filling up with text.

Silenus rolled his eyes. “Except they already _are_ everywhere,” he muttered. “Dammit, one of these days I’m going to have words with Hermes for inventing that technology.”

 _“Buggery,”_ Iaon said, blowing out a slightly annoyed breath. “Si, _so_ sorry, I really should have expected this.” Iaon waved a hand through the text and vanished it, as he wasn't sure how the God had its privacy settings set up, and there was no telling at first glance whether what he was sending was meant to be confidential.

He picked up his cup, drank half of it, sighed. The rest of it would wind up being dumped into what everyone called “the libation tank”, where it would at least go toward making better-than-average vinegar. “But when bloody duty calls...” He levered himself up.

“Hope it isn’t _actually_ bloody.”

“With the God you can never tell,” Iaon said, resigned. “At least I’m never bored.”

“It’s all you can ask for in this life,” said Silenus as Iaon shrugged into his chlamys. “Don’t worry your head about that prezzie: I’ll take care of it as soon as I go. One of Hephaestus’s bots’ll bring it round tonight.”

“Right, ta much.” He gripped the satyr’s shoulder and shook it gently as he went round the table toward the door. “You make sure you get yourself some down time, yeah? Sounds like you’ve had more excitement this week than you’ve wanted.”

“The story of our lives, from the sound of it,” Silenus said, and grinned his trademark resigned grin. “You mind out too. Night, Iaon.”

***

Iaon trotted up the seventeen stairs and in through the sitting room door. “Well,” he said, “I’m assuming it was something important, so—”

He stopped short, gazing around. There were piles of wood-framed wax tablets all over the sitting room, on almost every flat surface. _Good Gods,_ Iaon thought, _where have all_ these _been?_ Though it then occurred to him that he knew nothing about what the Consulting God might be using for offsite information storage. Tablets always just seemed to come and go as required.

The God was down among the biggest heap of tablets in the middle of the floor, flinging them about with unusual unconcern for their framing. Iaon went over to him. “You said you needed me?”

“Looking for something,” the God said, and flung a tablet in Iaon’s general direction. “Very important.”

Iaon caught it more or less by reflex: and then another one, flung the same way. “Research?” Iaon said.

“Obvious,” the God muttered.

“What exactly are you looking for?”

“A detail from a cold case,” the God said, tossing more tablets around. “From before your time. Didn’t you read the text?”

“Not all the way through,” Iaon said. “Not in public. Just saw you needed me, and came. I knew you’d explain it to me all over again anyway.” He was about to add “What brought this on?”, and then stopped himself. It was likely enough that _he’d_ brought this on, as part of the God’s search for something to occupy himself while out of the House.

“How often have I told you not to deduce without data, Iaon?” said the God, sounding a bit grouchy. “It prejudices the judgment.”

Iaon rolled his eyes. “Well? Do feel free to enlighten me.”

“Every day, and always a pleasure. Ever heard of the Danaïds?”

“Uh…” Iaon thought for a moment. “No.”

“Fifty sisters. Over here from Khem. Killed their husbands.”

 _“Fifty,”_ Iaon said, starting to consider what kind of home life was implied by one man having fifty daughters, and then hurriedly shying away from the concept. “And to think you consider _your_ family dysfunctional.”

“They didn’t kill them all,” the God said, jumping up to pull the settee out from the wall. “Forty-nine of them, though, yes.” He dropped to his knees, bathrobe flaring about him, and started going through the twenty or so tablets revealed to be under there. Iaon blinked at this, as the Thalastrae’s housekeeping was usually better than this. _Then again,_ he thought, _not much dust on them. Therefore relatively recent._

“Fifty wives killed forty-nine husbands…” Iaon said, continuing to try to wrap his brain around this. He wasn’t really used to considering marriage as such a bulk commodity.

“All their cousins, by the way,” the God said, kneeling up to peer narrowly at one tablet and then chuck it away.

Iaon blinked. “Now I don’t care what they do over by the Nile,” Iaon said, taking the thought further on to what a family with fifty _sons_ would be like, and shying away from that even more quickly if possible, “but _that_ is _such_ a good reason to avoid marrying your close relations…”

“Or indeed anyone at all, but that’s neither here nor there,” the God said. “No matter, it’s good, you follow!”

“Actually, no.”

The God kept on going through the tablets as if this wasn’t a problem. “Aegyptus, you’re right on the money there, he’s the husbands’ father, brother of the father of the brides, Danaus. All of them living by the shores of the Nile, in the heart of their own little population explosion, until all of a sudden this wedding was proposed. At first Danaus and his fifty girls were apparently dead set against it. But then all of a sudden there was a change of heart, and before you know it the whole lot of them have headed off to the scenic Greeklands to get all _hitched_." The God's voice was dry. "Ever so suspicious to begin with, even if I was susceptible to weddings I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to be any part of _that_ one—”

The God pushed the settee back and crawled over to a pile of tablets under the window. His whole body was tight with that normally very reined-in tension that he often exhibited on a case, here displayed in fullest flower because there was no one but Iaon to see. “And then without warning, you’ve got forty-nine bridegrooms stabbed on their wedding night, and only one holdout, it struck me as odd when it originally went down, and there were also some irregularities about the evidential stage of the trial, and taken all together, well, it occurred to me at the time, but it occurred again just now and on consideration I believe there might just be a way to—” More tablets flew. “There was this gap in the chain of reported events, Iaon, and I just realized what might have been the cause, and if we can just nail down what _happened_ there, just track down and confirm this _one detail—”_

Iaon looked around at the space that had been so tidy, and which in twelve hours or less would be having a visitor whom he really needed to impress. He sighed. “Do we really need to be doing this right this minute?”

“Right this minute those forty-nine women are in _Hell_ , Iaon,” the God said as he flipped more tablets about. “Labouring without rest in the pits of Tartarus, condemned to eternally draw water from the river of Death with nothing but leaky jugs. I imagine they’d quite like to stop any time now. Especially if, as I now strongly suspect, they were all of diminished capacity at the time of the murders, and therefore _innocent.”_ From down on his hands and knees he gave Iaon a surprisingly sharp look. “Assuming it’s not too much trouble for you to give me a hand here, and you’re not too busy?”

Iaon sighed—because of course the God was in the right—and got down on his knees to help him start going through the tablets.

They were hours about it. It would have been (Iaon thought with some vague regret) about chucking-out time at the Slug when without warning he was the one who triumphed in their search—finally finding the note the God wanted, scrawled almost illegibly in the middle of a far longer treatise on the many different kinds of ashes left by the burning of some leaf he’d never heard of, something from beyond the Pillars of Herakles. The God snatched the tablet out of his hands, read it, read it again, crowed _“Yes!”,_ thrust the tablet back into Iaon’s hands again and flung himself into his chair, steepling his hands under his chin.

Iaon squinted at the interlineation. “‘Pedigree ramifications, spiked _oinochoe_ —’ What’s this next word? I can’t make it out.”

“Nêpenthes.”

It was a generalized term for pain relief. Iaon shook his head. “‘Nêpenthes opportunity, unreliable witness, double jeopardy...’?”

“Mmm,” the God said, already deep in thought. “It’s an easy claim. But first one must prove motive….”

“Are you going to tell me what any of this _means?”_

“Premature, Iaon…”

Iaon sighed, turned his head back to the rest of the tablet. “Why would people even _do_ this?” he said, shaking his head as he started to pick up some of the details about the qualities of the plant responsible for these two hundred and fifty kinds of ash.

“What? Do what?”

“This note you made—it says people set this stuff on fire and breathe it in? On purpose?”

“They will do. In great numbers, and vast quantities.”

Iaon shook his head, snapped the tablet shut. “It can’t be good for you.”

“It won’t be,” the God said, “believe me. Deadly, in fact. Nonetheless it has its attractions…”

Iaon sighed. _Wonderful._ Another _dangerous thing for him to be interested in. It’s a good thing Gods are so robust._ He put the tablet down on the partner desk and glanced over toward the bookshelf on seeing something flicker there.

“Tried it a few times,” the God murmured, “but the delivery system’s faulty, as you say. No future in it, before you know it it’ll be impossible to keep up a habit in a city of any size…”

The God trailed off, apparently finally realizing after some seconds without a reply that Iaon wasn’t paying that much attention to him any more. His attention, rather, was on the little glass window on the bookshelf. There, in the dark of night, some people were sitting around a cooking fire in the shadow of Mount Aroania. Off at the edge of the circle of light cast by the dancing flames were a cart, a tethered and restless six-month’s lamb, a mule, a donkey. Nearer the fire, seated cloaked forms surrounded it, bending close to the flames as if the light was of any use as protection against the shadows beyond.

Iaon gazed at the one shape in the dark chlamys, a little removed from the others around the fire. The light caught golden in her tightly bound-up hair. There was no seeing her face at this distance, and anyway, her head was bowed.

The God looked up at Iaon. Then he rose, and stood silent by him for a moment. Finally he shook his head. “I still don’t understand it, my Prince,” he said. “You say the two of you were close. Yet half the time, in latter years, when the two of you were anywhere near one another you weren’t even speaking.”

Iaon shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense to me either sometimes,” he said. “Half of it’s memory of what’s lost that you want to get back. The other half…” He shrugged, turned his face away. “When you love someone, liking them isn’t necessarily part of the package.”

“Irrational.”

“Yes,” Iaon said, turning his back on the glass window and his face to the God, slipping his arms around him. “Very often. How rational is it for a God to love a mortal? Or for a mortal to love a God who insists on leaving random body parts in the Cupboard that’s Cold?” He smiled just slightly.

The God gave him a dry look. “Well, after you told me you didn’t want them in with the tea and the jam, where else was I supposed to put them?”

Iaon laughed a bit helplessly: then sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I should try to get some sleep. Come with me?”

The God nodded. “For a while,” he said. “We both have an early morning, I’m afraid.”

“Maybe best we call it a night, then.”

Iaon headed down toward the Chamber, suddenly very weary; and without argument or remonstration the God followed.

***

On a broad cliff on Mount Aroania, in a little tent with one of her waiting-women sleeping between her and the door, the princess Arêtë Dasosarchëidë slept, and dreamed.

To her in her dream came a willowy-slender dark-cloaked shape that sat down beside her on the thick-folded rug on which she lay, and bent a little way down toward her as if looking to see if she was asleep. And Arêtë looked up in surprise to see that it was Speio Theisanidë, raven-tressed Speio, on whom she had not set her eyes for nigh on thirty years.

“Speio,” Arêtë whispered, caught between amazement and sudden sorrow. For Speio was beautiful, more beautiful by far than she had been even when Arêtë had still dreamt of her years ago—before the long bitter grief at their separation had burned itself out through pain to hopelessness, before her dreams slowly gave it all up for lost and stopped showing her any more glimpses of her first great love.

Arêtë’s sorrow grew as she looked on Speio’s youthful loveliness, for she knew all too well what the ruthless years and the harsh outdoor life had done to her own looks. Yet Speio sat gazing down on her with a strange thoughtful expression, sombre but gentle, almost as if Arêtë had nothing to be ashamed of.

Speio leaned closer and bowed her head further down toward Arêtë’s, all that dark hair of hers falling down between them and over Arêtë’s breasts like a silken curtain, a shimmering shadow. It smelt of the rosemary they used to put in the rinsing water after they’d washed their hair together, and the scent suddenly brought those summer afternoons back to Arêtë: all the freedom, the laughter, the lazy togetherness. In that lovely voice of hers—striking Arêtë with another deep pang of shame, for after all these years she’d forgotten what her voice sounded like—Speio said, “Are you sleeping yet, Princess, all worn out with your sorrow? No surprise, perhaps, when you’ve come so long a way on the hard roads to do sacrifice for Prince Iaon’s soul.”

“I _am_ sad,” Arêtë said, slowly sitting up, as one sometimes moves without hurry in a dream even when the most unlikely things are happening. “But amazed, too: amazed to see you. Why in the world am I seeing you now?” And then she laughed. “And why do you sound like you do? You’d never have called Iaon ‘Prince.’” Memory made her laugh again. “You always called him ‘Little Lord Skinnybones’ or “your wee blond brat of a brother.’”

“Did I now,” Speio said, and scowled. But such was her loveliness in Arêtë’s eyes that even this expression looked beautiful on her.

“Don’t look that way, I don’t hold it against you, any more than he ever did! Oh, Speio, I’ve missed you so. We haven’t seen each other for so very long…” _Since we were torn apart. Since it was all over, since our together-life ended._ For Speio’s parents had panicked after the two of them ran away together. Arêtë had later learned that within weeks of Speio returning to the City, they’d married her off to a nobleman down south in Troezen, weeks’ journey away—too far across the mountains and rivers of the Peloponnese for even the boldest Maenad to journey alone. Most men respected the God’s devotees, and when they ran in bands, even feared them: but by no means all. A Bacchante by herself was only slightly less a target for enslavement or murder than any other lone woman journeying in the wilds.

“I wish I could just have flown to you, flown over the mountains and the rivers to that back-of-beyond place they made you go,” Arete murmured, reaching out to her, half-shamefaced but suddenly feeling something of her old forgotten desire as if it was new. “But there just wasn’t any way to come to you. It turned out you were right after all.” She couldn’t keep the sadness out of her voice. “I always thought everything would be possible for us if we just made everyone _understand_ how much we loved each other. I was so sure they’d have to see it was _right_ to let us be together. Not to just blindly follow the stupid rules and do the obvious, predictable thing…”

She took Speio’s hand, felt the long-remembered smoothness of it. Speio gazed down at this with an expression of soft bemusement, and after a moment turned Arêtë’s hand over in hers, gazing down at it as if the shape or size of it had somehow taken her by surprise. Then she looked into Arêtë’s eyes. “Let me invite you to do something less predictable, then,” she said. “You wished to fly? Then your wish is heard. And when you wake, the Gods will grant it.”

Arêtë laughed softly. “You were always full of these mad stories and fairy tales just waiting to come true,” she said, the humour tinged with sadness. “And I only made you worse. All these magic things were supposed to happen for us. And even though they never did, silly us, somehow we never stopped believing…”

“Then this day will bring the reward for your belief,” said Speio. “This morning when you wake, wash and array yourself and do what else needs to be done to meet the day. Then dismiss your attendants, go apart from them, and wait alone near the olive tree. There your brother waited to meet his fate. It came for him, and by the Gods’ will bore him off from this height to another place, to heights far greater. Trust yourself to the wind, therefore, and see for yourself what that place looks like.”

As Speio spoke, Arêtë had been noticing something odd. When they’d been young together, Speio’s eyes had been dark, almost as dark as her hair. But _this_ Speio’s eyes were light, as silvery pale as Artemis’s cold moon through cloud, and there was an odd reluctant challenge in them.

Now, as she heard Speio’s words and started to make sense of them, Arêtë’s eyes opened wide to meet those moonlight ones. “Is he—are you telling me that Iaon isn't in _—_ that _Iaon_ is—”

“I may not tell you with certainty of his fate or state,” Speio said, her voice once more gone quiet and sombre. “Besides, what fun is it if someone else solves the puzzle for you? But in any case it’s a bad thing to babble on and on like the wind that blows. Wait by the tree, and if you dare, take the adventure that comes to you: as he did.”

Speio glanced down again at Arêtë’s hand, dropped it, and met Arêtë’s eyes once more with that look of silvery challenge: then faded away, darkness into darkness.

And Arêtë took a long breath and opened her eyes on reality, on the chilly dimness that heralded dawn, in the hour when dreams come that are true.

***

Iaon stood by the window, looking out into the gray light that preceded dawn. _At least it’s clear,_ he thought. _It’ll be pretty for her today, if nothing else. What was it Thalastrae called it? Tourist weather…?_

He felt the shadows stirring behind him, and turned. There stood the God, looking (by his stance and what Iaon could see of his gaze) a touch subdued. “All right?”

“It’s done,” he said, joining Iaon by the window.

“How did she take it?”

The God shrugged. “Well enough. Doubtless she’ll tell you.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s strange,” the God said, very low, “how like you she is. Yet how unlike.”

Iaon smiled just slightly, shook his head. “Kind of a shame you were an only child,” he said. “You’d have a better grip of how these things go.”

“I could swear I’d heard you say that one of me was enough…”

“And it’d still be true,” Iaon said. “But…” He shrugged, glanced out the window again.

“I should go,” said the God.

The urge was still prickling at the back of Iaon’s mind to say _No, don’t, stay, we’ll call it off!_ But that was childish. All the arrangements were in place: everything was ready. This needed to be _done_ , once and for all, so they both could get back to business as usual. Delaying it would serve no purpose, and would probably just make things worse. “All right,” Iaon said.

“I’ll see you at sunset then,” said the God.

“What about dinner?” Iaon said, for all the world as if nothing unusual was going to happen today. _Nothing terrible,_ something shadowy in the back of his mind whispered to him. “Ch’inese?”

“If you like. Iaon—” The God took him by the arms. “This is important.”

Iaon waited, looking up into his shadows for the glint of pale eyes.

“No matter what you think, you’re not responsible for your sister’s troubles… for the changes in her life. If anyone is, _I_ am. Make sure she knows it.”

Iaon let out a breath. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll just blame you for everything, shall I? That sounds like it’ll work.”

“It’s not about blame, Iaon.” The God gazed down at him, intent. “Mummy Aphrodite once told me—not that I understood her at the time—that love was that state in which another’s happiness meant more to you, was more important to you, than your own.” He shook his head as if re-experiencing some old bewilderment. “I had no referent for such a concept, until, well. Until you.” The God looked embarrassed. “But by that definition, if your sister loves you, and she knows this was all done to save your life—then I doubt she’ll complain. If she does…”

“This is my sister we’re talking about,” Iaon said, and sighed. “She always complains.” Yet despite all the surrounding complications, his heart still gave a strange leap at the thought of seeing her again in just a little while. “We’ll get it sorted out.”

The God merely looked down at him, closed his eyes, nodded.

“Sunset,” the God said, and tugged the Cloak closed about him, bent to touch his lips to Iaon’s: and was gone.

Iaon turned, pushed the drapes aside.

Out beyond the windows, the West Wind rose.


	31. Of a Sister's Visit to the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After months of mourning, Prince Iaon’s Maenad sister Arêtë learns that her brother miraculously isn’t dead after all. And though Iaon’s got answers, they may not be the right ones… for Arêtë doesn’t care how he did it: she wants to know _why._
> 
> Warnings for prevarication, obfuscation, buttercream frosting, naked gods (not the usual one[s]…), drug smuggling, mental reservations, and denial.

The mist was like a wall.

On most mornings, shortly after sunrise—regardless of what the greater winds of the season’s prevailing weather might be doing—from low down on Olympus’s knees came a rising wind that slid its way up the mountainsides and stirred the upper airs. This morning was no exception. But that wind was having no effect whatsoever on the vague expanse of fog, as thick as any cloud, that now lay right round the swath of greensward surrounding the House and its garden. As Iaon paced again and again up and down along it, and back to the place of the two pillars at the end of the stone-laid walk that led from the door of the House, again and again he came within arm’s reach of the mist and stopped…  then swung away, paced again. He knew this concealment was for his protection. _So why is it that instead I’m feeling trapped?_

The blank blurry wall of mist ran highest westward of the House, nearly to the zenith. Iaon stopped more than once, craning his neck, as concerned that nothing of the great Mount should show past it as he was half upset it didn’t. Every evening, every morning, that staggering view met him as he and the God headed out to cases or returned from them: the raw beauty of the mountain itself, and the blaze of divine light that crowned it. That his sister should come here and be denied that, the awe and the glory of it, seemed all wrong. _And we could be anywhere, here,_ Iaon thought a bit sadly, turning away from where the view should have been. _Some cut-rate demigod’s holiday home, tucked away at the back of beyond…  Instead of where we are. Always at the edge of wonder._

But not today, for the true cause of the wonder was offsite; and there was already something odd going on about this in the pit of Iaon’s stomach, though the God was only a little while gone. _Never mind. Just nerves. Other things to think about right now._ And there were, because if the weather turned bad later in the day, as it sometimes did this time of year, they wouldn’t even be able to sit outside. _Not that there's anything to see, dammit._ And where the hell was that bottle? Silenus had promised... _Well, maybe something came up. And anyway, the day’s young yet. Let’s not panic._

He turned to look over his shoulder. The Bees were relatively quiet, as they sometimes were on mornings when they somehow knew the weather was likely to turn shortly. There was only a little traffic among the remnants of the roses, the tiny quick-moving shapes now mostly seeking out what flowers were open among the bedding plants—those little purple-spotted wild orchids and scarlet chalcedony lilies and silvery fringe-petalled _kentaurea_ that Mrs. Hudson went out to water from the fountain every day.  _The garden’s not really at its best either. Well, it can’t be helped, if the rain’ll just hold off that’ll be fine…_

Iaon looked up and out again, vaguely irritated by all the uncertainties in this situation, and stared into the unrevealing mist. Then he realized it wasn’t so unrevealing after all. There was a gradual curdling in the silvery fog in front of him, out past the nearby cliff-edge, where   the view to the southwest would normally be. Seconds later Iaon could see it wasn’t a curdling at all, really, but a slight darkening. Something was pushing through the fog toward him, though seemingly not at any great speed; the mist stirred and swirled around it the way it did on misty mornings when the wind was getting ready to change.

He squinted into the swirling grey. Even what he could feel stirring around him now was the merest breath of breeze, hardly enough to be called a wind at all. Yet there, deep in the mist and coming closer, Iaon could make out just a hint of a shape like a man’s, partly obscured by crosswise bulks of some other shape. It was hastening along through the sky directly toward him in swiftly shortening strides, and was defined from moment to moment more by where the mist swirled and briefly _wasn’t_ than by anything else. As it drew closer, Iaon could better make out an oblong patch of something light and something dark in front of it, something being carried in the approaching form’s arms.

Despite the tension of the moment, Iaon couldn’t help but grin, for this was the most clearly he’d ever seen Westie in all these months of working with him. The wind rose a little more and the mist thinned, and there he was—more or less, anyway, a brawny naked man-shape carved out of wind—taking a last few steps downward through the cloudy air and through the wall of mist with his burden, a bundle of white robes and dark chlamys and silver-golden hair bound up tight. Or mostly bound up, for it looked like one of Arêtë’s braids had come loose. Loose locks of it were whipping about in the tightly located breeze surrounding the one who carried her and was even now starting to put her down.

And then maybe it was something about the change in lighting that set her off in a sudden bout of flailing and struggling and kicking. Iaon hurried toward them, but he was too late to keep the inevitable from happening. A second later Arêtë wrenched herself out of West Wind’s arms and came down hard on her bum on the turf, some four or five cubits beyond the two pillars. There she sat, half hunched over, panting, her hands clenched into the grass and her eyes squeezed shut.

The wind breathed softly in Iaon’s ear as he crossed the last few cubits between them, and the sound of it said, though not in so many words, _You were a_ way _easier ride, Iaon. She’s physically… kind of opinionated._

“Sorry,” Iaon whispered, _“so_ sorry about that…”

_I’ll be back a quarter hour before sunset. With athletic protection, if you take my meaning._

“Ow,” Iaon said under his breath. “Right. Thanks.”

He leaned down and took Arêtë gently under the elbows to help her stand. But the breath was sucked straight out of him as, eyes still closed, she yanked her arms away from his hands and scrabbled backwards away from him on the turf with the violently reflexive motion of someone who wasn’t sure what had happened to them or where they were or who’d just touched them, but wanted absolutely no part of it.

It was like having a knife stuck into him. Gods knew that had happened to him more than once, both before and after he’d met the God, but this was far worse, far more intimate: a thinner blade and a sharper one than any of those. _And what do you expect, she’s not looking at anything right now and she hasn’t even heard your voice! What was she supposed to do, deduce you from your smell?_ “Arêtë,” Iaon said. “I’m sorry! Arêtë, come on—”

And the knife stuck him again, in a different place, a different way, as his sister’s eyes flew open and she stared up at him, pale, wide-eyed, almost haggard. Months’ worth of emotion went fleeting across her face, packed with terrible force into a few moments’ worth of expressions—horror, grief, shock, utter disbelief, amazement, and finally something surely too raw and jagged-edged to be joy.

“It’s true,” she said, and it came out half a gasp and half a sob, “it was in the dream but oh it’s really true— _Iaon!”_ And she was scrambling to her feet, didn’t need his help to get up at all, just flung herself at him and clutched him by his upper arms and stared into his face. Arêtë ran her hands down his arms to take his own in hers, pulling them close to look at the backs of them, turning them over to look at the palms and fingers. Then she straightened and her eyes met Iaon’s again as she stared into his face once more as if looking for something, looking so hard—

“You’re— Iaon. You’re—”

“Uh, not dead,” he said. “Short version. Yeah.” And he gripped her hands back hard, for all of a sudden it was shouting itself all through him how terribly he’d missed the mere possibility of her presence all this while, even though he so often hadn’t wanted to be around her when that possibility had been a given. “Arêtë, are you all right, look at you! You’re all mussed up, I’m so sorry, let me—”

But she was putting him away from her now, pushing back again, pulling her hands out of his… and this time it was far more deliberate, the action, the way she stared at him, her face working strangely. “Iaon,” she said.

“Yes, of course, yes,” was all he was able to say before Arêtë’s eyes narrowed and she cocked her right arm back and punched him right in the face, _hard_.

Seeing stars, staggering, Iaon lurched away from her almost into one of the nearby pillars, clutching his left cheek and wondering if she’d broken the bone. _Not the nose, not the teeth, just lucky she likes me, I guess—_ assuming _she still likes me!_ He wheeled toward her again, blinking, trying to work his jaw and being rewarded for it with a sharp flash of pain, _not dislocated, Gods be thanked, just lucky!_ “Arêtë, what the hell, _what was that for?”_

She’d whirled away from him: now she whirled back, eyes blazing. “Iaon Peithos Dasosarchëidês, how _dare_ you! How _dare_ you ask me that! All this time you’ve been _here?_ All this time you’ve been alive and breathing and you just let us go on thinking you were _dead?_ For weeks, for months! Iaon, how _could_ you! How could you just let us mourn you, our brother, our son—”

“I—” _Let you know,_ he was going to say, except that wasn’t true and that particular issue was going to take some careful explaining. “Arêtë, _listen_ to me, it’s not the way I’d like to have done it, things here have been difficult enough without—” _Without you throwing one of your temper tantrums right now! Really starting to wish I’d never had this idea—_ “I did what I had to do,” Iaon said after a moment, and held out his hands to Arêtë again, even though he was half afraid she’d refuse to take them. “You have to let me explain, Arêtë, for all Gods’ sake will you just sit down and— _just come sit down,_ all right?!”

There was a stone bench down by the right-hand pillar at the end of the path, these days: an afterthought from the day the God’s Mummies had come to visit and he and the tipsy Terpsichore had trashed one of the lawn chairs while she was teaching him something called a “waltz”. (“If you’re going to make a habit of such occupations, my Prince, we’ll really need some more stable seating…”) Arêtë now stumbled the few steps past Iaon to the bench and sat down on it hard, wearing the expression of a woman who’d had everything become a bit too much for her.

Iaon sat down next to Arêtë, but not nearly as close to her as he would have normally, back in the days when… _When what? When we were still talking? When I didn’t speak to her half the time she was around? When I wasn’t missing and presumed dead?_ Head bowed, Iaon let out a breath, blinking a bit still with the pain, and finally turned his head to gaze at her. The morning light in the garden wasn’t that bright, the sun was just getting close to the top of that wall of mist, but there was no concealing how much more silver there was in Arêtë’s hair than he remembered. She looked drawn and tired and so much _older_ than when he’d seen her last. _Is it just that we haven’t been apart for this long for years and years now?_ Iaon thought. _But that can’t be true. Did_ I _do this to her? Oh God._

“Arêtë,” he said finally. He wasn’t sure where to go with this, but he had to start _somewhere_. “How was your journey?”

She swallowed. “Oh fine,” Arêtë said, “just fine, perfectly lovely in fact, I just got snatched up off the ground by something I couldn’t see or feel and yanked up into the air, right into some kind of big gray nothing so I couldn’t see anything else that was happening either, for at least an _hour_ though it felt like a lot longer because I was half deaf from the wind and the shaking around, and the _bird_ that hit me in the head like a rock from a sling, some kind of skylark or something, got the fright of _its_ life I’m sure, but other than that, just fine, nothing to it, _why do you ask?”_

Iaon was holding himself very, very still, because about halfway through this he could see from the look on Arêtë’s face that the shell of her anger was starting to crack. Indeed as she vented her aggravation she was not only calming down but starting to feel like laughing herself…  and if he did it before _she_ did it, he’d be doomed. He therefore did his very best to keep command of himself, concentrating on looking as chastened and contrite as the God had after Iaon caught him in the act of putting bonestripper beetles in the olive oil jar for the third time in a week. “Well, it’s what people do, isn’t it? Ask how your trip was.” Iaon dropped his gaze again. “I knew that it was going to have to be unusual...”

_“Unusual!”_

“Well, we’re a long way from, well, _anywhere_ normal here, when you get right down to it, so the mode of transport…”

“Unusual doesn’t _begin_ to describe it.” Then Arêtë’s eyes opened wider. “And my poor people back there! If they saw anything… what are they even thinking now? That I threw myself off the cliff somehow?” She clutched at her face in distress.

Iaon reached hurriedly to take her hands again and pull them down. This time, at least, she didn’t pull out of his grip. _Human hands. How strange not to feel that sort-of-fire inside that you always feel when you touch him. Just flesh instead, mortal, ordinary—_ “They won’t have seen,” Iaon said. “Arêtë, it’s all right! Westie will have whispered in someone’s ear, told them that you were safe. That a god had business with you, and they should go ahead with the sacrifice and then go home.”  

“What?” Arêtë blinked. “Westie? Who’s Westie?”

“The West Wind. He’s the one who brought you here.”

“My god,” she said again, and Iaon found himself wondering which God she meant when she said that—assuming she wasn’t just using it casually. “You’re on nickname basis with an _immortal_?”

 _You have no idea._ “Well, yes, as it turns out he really _hates_ ‘Zephyros,’ and once you—” Iaon stopped himself. “Look, there’s so much to tell you, but Arêtë, you’re not even over our threshold yet, you haven’t had so much as a bite or a sup and what am I doing keeping you out here? Come on, come inside!”

He got up and tugged at her hand a little for her to stand up and come with him; but she didn’t move right away, just looked up at him. Iaon paused, feeling suddenly hollow inside. “Uh,” he said. “Will you? Come inside?” He took a breath. _Maybe this is all still happening too fast for her. Maybe—_ “Unless maybe you need to punch me again. Maybe we should stay out here for that. No point in getting blood on the carpets.” _More blood, actually,_ he thought, but it seemed better not to say that out loud: the God’s experiments were going to take enough explanation as it was.

Arêtë was flexing her free hand, her right hand, staring at it. After a moment her mouth, which had been set in a grim straight line, turned down a little at the corners. “Iaon,” she said, sounding subdued. “I’d barely laid eyes on you and what did I just do to you, _say_ to you…”

“What you had a right to,” Iaon said, just as subdued. “What not even the most idiotic brother could blame you for saying, under the circumstances. Because you didn’t know what’s happened, and…” 

And he was out of words. He shook his head. “Arêtë,” he said. “Gods, but I’ve really missed you.”

She looked at him for a long still moment.

And then Arêtë’s face worked and changed, and _“Oh Iaon!”_ she said with a sob, and pulled him down onto the bench again and threw her arms around his neck and pushed the side of her head against his and held his head tight against her. And if Arêtë wept then, well, so did Iaon: and in the back of his mind, the verse from the _Odyssey_ about the sea-eagles whispered itself briefly over the sniffling and then went quiet.

It took a few minutes for the tears to run their course and for the two of them to put themselves back in order. “Come on,” Iaon said, “look at us both, let’s get your hair sorted, there are people inside for you to meet.” _Not the one I most wish you could… but he’s almost certainly right, it just wouldn’t be wise._

“Who?”

“Not a lot. The staff… the goddess who takes care of us a bit when we’re home…” They got up and started up the white stone walk together, holding hands. “It’s not a big household.”

Arêtë nodded; then after a moment said, “You said ‘Our threshold.’”

Iaon had been trying to work out how to start broaching the details of all this. _Now’s as good a time as any_. “The threshold of the House of the Two Hundred and Twenty-One Bees. I share it with the one who had me brought here.”

She looked dubious. “You mean the great dark monster in the message? It keeps bees?”

Iaon had to laugh. “He!” he said. “He’s not a monster! …Or no more than your average spoiled ten-year-old once they’re grown up.”

“Oh. Just like _you_ were, then.”

“I was not spoiled!”

“Were too. Little Prince Knobby-Knees.”

Iaon blinked, then laughed. His sister hadn’t called him a name like that for years, not since back when she was in the depths of her love affair with Speio. “Where’d _that_ come from all of a sudden?”

Her gaze went a bit inturned for a moment. “Dreams,” she said. “It’s all right.” She looked around them. “This is all very pretty…”

“You should see it in the summer,” Iaon said. “The red roses especially, when the sunset’s on them.”

“Mami’s always liked the red ones best.”

“Yes,” Iaon said. “There are times I’d have loved to send her some, but—” He shook his head. “We’re such a distance away. No matter. I think of her when I see them.”

He was trying not to sound sad, but perhaps it hadn’t worked. Next to him, Arêtë had paused on the pathway. “Iaon,” she whispered. Her voice sounded strangely tense.

He turned. “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to sound unhappy. I’m really not.”

“Not that!” Arêtë said, and Iaon realized she was staring at him again. “It’s just, Iaon, you’re not limping any more! You’re healed!”

“Uh, yeah. Really, it just sort of—”

“He _healed_ you, this, this creature?!” Her expression was strangely torn between delight and fear.

“He’s a _God_ , Arêtë,” Iaon said, and it came out a little more sharply than he intended. “I know what the original message said, but believe me, you don’t want to be making any judgments based on old news.” Then he sighed. “Sorry. I’m just— Come on, let’s get in and let me make you properly welcome, and I’ll tell you everything, I promise.”

They continued up the path. “One thing first,” Iaon said. They paused by the hive not far from the doorway.

It was very, very quiet: not a Bee coming in or a Bee coming out. There weren’t even the ten or twenty who normally sat on the entry ledge working their wings to help the air flow in and out. It was odd. But then Iaon thought of how long it had taken them to get comfortable with him. _And here’s a stranger that they know they won’t see more than once._

He sighed. It didn’t matter: he knew what he needed to do. “This is my sister Arêtë, ladies,” he said, “come to visit for the day.”

The humming inside the hive, soft and steady, didn’t waver; grew no louder, sank no softer. It was as if neither of them was there—or as if everything in the hive was reduced to some kind of sightless watchfulness, waiting to see what would happen next.

Iaon nudged Arêtë gently with his elbow. “Hello,” she said to the hive after a moment.

There was not the slightest change in the sound from inside. Iaon shrugged. “Having a lie-in, possibly,” he said, though he was sure that whatever was going on was nothing of the kind.  “They’re not your average bees…”

He turned away and led Arêtë toward the door. “Just as well, maybe,” she said. “I’m not wild about bees to start with.”

“Oh, I remember,” Iaon said. “That time that swarm fell off the strawberry tree out by the east vineyard?”

 _“Please,”_ Arêtë said, and shivered all over. “I’m amazed you remember that, though…”

“You’d be surprised what I remember,” Iaon said as they stepped up onto the doorstep and the dark door swung silently open before them.

Arêtë startled on seeing that there was no one there actually opening the door. Iaon put his spare arm around her shoulders, hugged her to him. “No, it’s all right!” he said. “This is a strange place, some ways, but nothing here will ever hurt you. Nothing would _dare!_ So don’t be upset at anything you see. Just come on in, sister mine.” And he smiled at her.  _How long since I last called her that? How long since I even_ wanted _to?_ “Come in, and be ever so welcome.”

***

He brought her up the seventeen steps to the sitting room, and Arêtë paused in the doorway, looking around at it all. “This is… snug.”

“Yes it is,” Iaon said, just a little ruefully. “Not all Gods live in giant marble palaces, as it turns out. But we’re comfortable. Here, sit yourself down over here. A sofa, it’s called.”

He went into the kitchen and quickly poured her a glass of wine from the amphoriska that had been set out ready on the table, along with a couple of plates of snacks in line with Iaon’s requests. The Thalastrae were being still for the moment: Iaon had asked them to wait until he ‘d had a chance to prepare Arêtë a little for the sight of things floating around without help.

Iaon brought their wine in, holding the two goblets in one hand by their stems, and put down the plate on the low table: then sat down beside her and handed Arêtë her glass.

She stared at it in astonishment, then reached out slowly to take it from him as if half afraid it might vanish in her hand like a touched bubble. “Oh Iaon, what _is_ this?”

“Lemnian,” he said, keeping it as deadpan as he could. “An ‘08, I think.”

“Iaon, s _top_ it!” She shoved his elbow with hers—not the elbow holding the glass—and for just a second she was fourteen again and annoyed at him, and he was nine and found that really funny, and everything was all right. “You know what I mean! _This!”_ She pushed the glass at his face.

He smiled. “Oh, that. That’s what we drink out of around here. When we’re being a bit formal, or when we have guests…”

She gazed at the crystal goblet in wonder, ran her thumb up and down the bowl of it, feeling the impossible smoothness. “It’s… It’s so beautiful, this is _glass_ , how does anyone get glass to look like this?”

“I wondered too, when I got here first,” he said. And the memory of that first afternoon—of the warmth by the fire, the gentle inward-crowding shadows, the dark form standing in the doorway, the soft deep voice like Night speaking—warmed him all over again. He smiled. “Never mind that now. Be welcome to our house, my guest.” And it was strange to say that to a mortal here, and on his own recognisance, instead of in company with the other half of the “our” and surrounded by Muses. 

“Thank you for your welcome, my host,” she said, half playing, half serious: and then glanced around to see what to do about her libation. “Uh, where do I pour exactly?”

“Over the floorboards is fine,” Iaon said. “Just keep it off the carpet.”

“Yes. All right.” She twisted her few drops of libation out of the glass and murmured one of the standard one-phrase prayers to All Gods, then said, “Looks like lots of other things have been on these floorboards as well.”

“Uh, yes,” Iaon said, and cleared his throat a bit, glancing at some of the pitting in the floorboards near the couch. still all too obvious despite his going at it repeatedly with pumice. Briefly he thought about telling her how the marks got there, and then decided that bringing up Hydra venom at this point was probably a non-starter. “The God does a lot of experiments in the line of business, and sometimes they get a little out of hand. Anyway... _Khaire_ , sister. Drink and be welcome.”

They touched glasses—very gingerly, on Arêtë’s side, and she startled at the soft chime of the crystal—and drank. “Oh,” she said after a moment spent tasting the wine, “that _is_ lovely. Wouldn’t Popi love that…”

“I hope he may,” Iaon said.

“Well, he doesn’t drink wine a lot any more. Or if he does, there are so many drugs in it he’s started saying he doesn’t care for the taste.”

“Perhaps that may change,” Iaon said, not daring for the moment to get too much into why he thought it might. There was a lot of ground to cover yet.

Arêtë had another drink of her wine, looking down into the bowl of the goblet and shaking her head at it. Then she leaned back into the cushions of the sofa, really relaxing for the first time that day. “So tell me,” she said. “Who is he, this God of yours? What’s his name?”

“He doesn’t have one yet. He’s new.”

“So not one of the great ones, then. Not one of the Twelve, in some kind of disguise.”

“Oh, no. He’s… kind of minor as yet,” Iaon said, even though his heart rebelled at saying such a thing.

“Well, I figured as much, we’re not on Olympus, after all.” Iaon took another drink of his wine, maybe a larger one than strictly necessary when it was a vintage he already knew perfectly well. “Where _is_ this, actually?”

“I can’t get into too many details, about that, sorry,” Iaon said. “Outside the mortal realms, anyway. But not so far away that getting in and out’s not doable, with Westie to help.” He wasn’t going to mention the Shadowcloak: the very last idea he wanted Arêtë to get was that it would somehow be easy for Iaon to drop in for casual visits.

“The suburbs, sort of,” Arêtë said. “Up northward, maybe? Toward where the Cimmerians are? You seem to have a lot of fog up here.”

“Yes we do,” Iaon said, and had another drink. _Slow down, at this rate you’re going to get yourself smashed and it’s not even near lunchtime yet…_

“And what’s he the God of?”

“Well, Deduction, certainly: that’s his division if anything is, though Those Above haven’t gone so far as to make it official yet. He reasons things out, sees the things no one else does… answers the questions no one else can answer.”

“Sort of an oracle, then.”

 _Sitting on a bar stool inhaling toxic fumes that would give God or man a migraine?_ he remembered the God muttering in scorn after coming home from a case where people had repeatedly assumed that was just what he did. _Not exactly my division. And I have better things to do than channel news bulletins for other deities, thank you very much!_ “Not as such,” Iaon said. _“_ He’s a consulting God. The only one.” And some of his pride slipped out regardless. “He invented the job.”

“Doesn’t sound like very heavy lifting,” Arêtë said, and smiled a bit, plainly meaning it to sound like a joke.

Iaon grimaced, and tried to hide the expression. But all he could see in his mind when she said that was the exhausted God, collapsed face-down on this very sofa after a really bad case, groaning as the weight of the aches of the ruthlessly driven body and the strain of the racing brain came crashing down on him, inevitably taking their toll.

“So besides all this reasoning and thinking and whatnot,” Arêtë said, “what does he _do_ , actually?”

  _“We,”_ Iaon said. “We solve crimes together: ones the Gods can’t solve themselves. We track down murderers, bring the wicked to justice. Find priceless stolen things, foil kidnappers, that sort of thing.” And what started to annoy Iaon as he listened to himself was how _pedestrian_ it sounded. Blogging about his and the God’s adventures was one thing: but his verbal storytelling plainly needed work. _And a situation where I’m not constantly afraid of saying too much!_

His stomach chose that moment to growl, and he blessed it. “Come on, Arêtë, try some of the smoked lamb, it’s lovely.” He popped one of the delicate little mini-pitas into his mouth and glanced toward the kitchen. “We’ve got some beef for lunch too, Mrs. Hudson does a terrific roast—”

“Wait. ‘Mrs. Hudson?’ Who’s that?”

“Remember I mentioned there’s a Goddess who keeps an eye on the place—  Look, if the lamb doesn’t work for you I’ll carve a slice or three off the beef, it’s had plenty of time to rest and it’s even still warm, it’ll go beautifully with this red.” He glanced toward the kitchen.

“Oh don’t bother, Iaon, the lamb’s— “

“No, why shouldn’t we get serious about the eating about now, at least have some bread to go with your wine, and I’ll get some oil,” _please Gods don’t let there be any beetles in it, “_ did you even have breakfast?”

“Well, there was some of that spelt porridge, but you know I—”

“Oh Gods, trail food, horrific! We can do a lot better than that. Here, have one of these, thank you, Thalastrae, we get this terrific sauce to go with it, it has some kind of sharp mustardy thing in it, see, you dip the little rolls of it in the sauce and then you—”

“Iaon.”

“No, seriously, it’s not all that hot, don’t be shy about it, it’s nothing like that fierce stuff we have at home that would take your head off—”

“Iaon.”

“And this bread they do, it’s more like a flatbread really, even though it’s so thin—”

 _“Iaon!”_ Arêtë shouted at him.

He stopped and stared at her.

_“Why is there a tray floating in the air!”_

Iaon realized to his horror that this was indeed the case, and that his glance toward the kitchen had been taken as the signal for some kind of food service to begin. He started to be furious with himself, as he’d made that arrangement with the Thalastrae hours ago… and then, in his nervousness had given the signal without even realizing it. “Oh gods, I’m sorry, Arêtë!” he said, reaching out to steady her. “It’s not a tray, it’s an invisible lady holding a tray.”

She stared at him. _“What?”_

“It’s my fault, Arêtë, I’m _so_ sorry, I should have told you right away before we sat down. It’s all right, that’s one of our staff, they _work_ here!”

“They? They _who?”_

“The ladies who work here, the Thalastrae. Say hello to my sister, you lot!”

But his only answer was silence.

Iaon blinked. “…Thalastrae?”

Nothing. From practice, he could hear where they were. But they wouldn’t speak. He supposed the God had forbidden them to, and guessed this was understandable: but nonetheless it made Iaon uncomfortable. He was so used to their voices, cheeky, cheerful, gentle by turns. _This is terrible…_

“I, uh, I think they must be operating in formal mode today,” Iaon said. “Sometimes they’re pretty quiet while they take care of us. It’s all right.”

“Thalastrae,” Arêtë said, listening to the word. “‘The stars of the Sea?’”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t they shine then?” It was plainly meant as a bit of a joke, but behind it Arêtë was worrying about something. “Why can’t we even see them?”

“It’s, uh, it’s personal.” _Personal enough that I never even once asked them exactly why they’re invisible,_ Iaon thought. _Why haven’t I ever done that? Have I just preferred to take them for granted all this time?_

“They’re not—not some kind of ghosts, are they?”

“What?” Iaon was so shocked he burst out laughing. _“No!_ They’re daughters of Okeanos, as it happens.” That much he did know. “Very nice ladies, you’d like them.”

His sister jumped as one of the Thalastrae’s hands brushed Arêtë’s while holding out a little service plate to her to put the incoming beef rolls on. Arêtë almost dropped her wineglass, but another unseen hand caught it and steadied it. At the touch of the fingers she couldn’t see against her own, Arêtë almost fumbled the glass again, but then managed to grab it by the stem as Iaon’s hand shot out to help her. “Sorry, sorry…!”

“No, Arêtë, it’s all right!”

“I’d never want to break something so pretty…”

“They really are pretty, aren’t they?” He smiled, but still he was feeling a little heartsore, thinking of how he too had jumped at first touch, down there on the path long ago, and then Thalastrae had gasped too and laughed and consoled him and worked to make him comfortable. To have the hands waiting on them without the voices being there too felt so very wrong. 

In any case Iaon had to smooth this over and concentrate on being a good host for the moment. “Arete, would you like one?”

“What, of the lamb things? It’s all right, Iaon, I just had one, they’re nice—”

“No, silly. One of the glasses. Just as a keepsake.”

“Oh, Iaon, I couldn’t!”

He knew that tone. “Yes you could. —Thal, would one of you dig out a spare of one of these? Wrap it up in something soft to keep it safe when Arêtë takes it home.” That, Iaon thought, would be one small way to work around the ban on her talking about this place. She still wouldn’t be able to say anything about how she came by the object itself, but when she showed it to their mother and father, the glass would speak on its own. It would say, _He’s in a place where he can freely give something so precious and unusual to a guest. Not just safe and happy, but doing quite well._

He turned back to her and found her giving him an even stranger look than before. “Wait. You said _ladies?”_

“What? Yes, but why would—” First he was baffled by Arêtë’s laughter and the wicked look she gave him, and then horrified. “No, it’s not like that, dear Gods, Arêtë what on _Earth_ are you even thinking of? They’re _staff_ , and anyway—” And now she had him thinking thoughts that had never crossed his mind, not once: _seriously, come_ on _, even if it was appropriate and one of them_ wanted—how _would you even— And they_ heard _that!_

And then slightly to his own surprise the thought came burning through him on a wave of embarrassment: _Oh, this is terrible,_ _when will this be_ over?!

Iaon was so shocked at himself that he almost fumbled his own glass as he put it down. Hurriedly he got busy swallowing away his mortification, occupying himself with serving Arêtë from the platter that one of the Thalastrae was offering him—one of the crispy fried pork-and-vegetable rolls the God favoured, from the Ch’inese, and a little spear-stick laden with juicy bits of grilled smoked pork. “I promised to tell you all about what’s going on here,” he said, doing his best to make sure his voice was even again, even cheerful. “And I will. But you have to tell me everything about what’s going on at home. Mother and Father and the City.” He smiled at himself as he took some of the delicately-sliced rolled beef for himself: he was more hungry for news than for food. “Tell me!”

So Arêtë began to, and as they ate matters settled between them a little, and Arêtë stopped shooting guarded glances around her to see where all the plates and glasses were and what they were doing. Their Father was well enough, as it happened—not much better, but also not much worse; not going out much, but on his feet for at least some of each day and puttering about the Palace. _He’s off his couch, anyway._ This cheered Iaon, as the medication Aesculapius had designed for him would be more effective in an ambulatory patient. _So we’ll see how that goes…_

Their mother had meanwhile been handling court-justice sessions in the City, and Arêtë had been sitting in on this business with Queen Ianeira for the last few weeks—learning how the arguments went, and how to dispense justice; learning the litigatees and their quirks and how to handle them. Iaon could see from the way Arêtë wrinkled her nose when describing this process that court-justice wasn’t exactly her favorite thing in the world. “All these people with their messy little lives and their nasty little grudges…” she muttered; and Iaon just nodded and smiled in a restrained sort of way. It was funny that in this dislike she and the God were, in some ways, on the same roll of the codex, and both of them far away from Iaon. For him, the details of those lives and the way their joys and angers tangled and intertwined were meat and drink. That was the part of the Work that he was best able to help the God with—the business of motivation and rationalisation, and how these drove mortals and immortals alike toward love or murder and all the states in between.

The thing that disappointed him most as the two of them talked was that the business of the City itself—the doings of the people in the streets, the gossip of ladies on their doorsteps and the crowds in the Market, the daily traffic in and out of the gates—was something Arêtë couldn’t have cared less about. “They’re quiet enough,” she said. “No problems. It’s not like they’re about to riot or anything. The harvest’s been fine. When it’s done we’ll be all set for the winter.”

Iaon caught himself making a face that to anyone who really knew him would have made it plain that riots were hardly the point. _Though that_ is _a relief about the harvest._ “Good,” Iaon said, “that’s good to hear.” He finished one of the Ch’inese vegetable rolls, thinking of the God as he did, and said, “And what about you?”

Arêtë frowned. “I’m all right,” she said.

Iaon knew instantly that she wasn’t. “Are people treating you as they should?” he said. It wouldn’t exactly take the God to deduce Arêtë’s reactions to being recalled to the duties of royalty after Iaon was removed from the local picture. And then there’d be others’ reactions, too, to the scapegrace Maenad princess suddenly thrust into what some people would see as her brother’s rightful place, be he ever so dead. “No matter where you’ve been until now, Arêtë, you’re a princess of our House: the _Crown_ Princess. If people need reminding, you shouldn’t be shy. I imagine Father and Mother aren’t.”

“No, Iaon, really, it’s all right,” Arêtë said, and had a longish drink of wine, and rolled her eyes afterwards. “I don’t… Everybody’s getting used to me. Let’s not talk about it, it’s just boring.”

She reached for the amphoriska on the table—rather suddenly, Iaon thought, as if not wanting to give any hands she couldn’t see a chance to do it—and poured for him first, then for herself. Then she sat back against the cushions again. “So never mind all that. Let’s get back to you and this nameless God of yours.”

“Mostly people call him the Consulting God,” Iaon said. “It works well enough.”

“All right. So you work as kind of… I don’t know: some kind of special guardians. For men or gods or…”

“For both,” Iaon said. “In a way, guardians: yes.”

“You go out and investigate things.”

“When we’re asked to,” Iaon said. “Hermes Argeiphontes calls on us when upper-level law enforcement gets out of its depth.” He would have added _Which is always,_ more or less out of reflex, but he restrained himself. Instead Iaon gave Arêtë, as an example, some of the details about the kidnapping from Elis of King Aithlios’s princess-fiancee—how they’d been pulled in to assist, what the God had deduced about the kidnapper, and what had followed after.  But he kept it to generalities, censoring himself pretty rigorously and wishing he didn’t have to.

“And you do this kind of thing often?” Arêtë said.

“All the time. In fact it’s rare to have a tenday off.”

“It sounds interesting.”

Iaon could hardly have thought of a blander or less comprehensive word to describe what they did if he’d sat and thought all day. Nonetheless, “It really, really is,” he said, and smiled.

“And this God, then,” Arêtë said. “If this is his house too, why’s he not here to welcome the guest?”

“Uh, he had business to take care of. I told him to go ahead. Anyway, we both knew it would mostly be me you’d be wanting to see, once you realised what was happening.” _That’s not_ quite _a lie…_

She gave him a thoughtful look. “I guess you’d have been right there,” she said. “Well, if he’s such a new god, there’ll hardly be a statue of him that I’d be likely to see. What’s he look like?”

“Uh,” Iaon said. “Kind of tall…”

“Taller than you?” his sister said, and there was the fourteen-year-old teasing him again. “That doesn’t take much.”

“Thanks a lot,” Iaon said, dry, and smiled at her. “About a head taller.”

“Fair? Dark?”

“Dark. Very.”

“What, is he from Khem or something?”

Iaon laughed. “Not _that_ dark.”

“Come on, Iaon, help me out, it’s like pulling teeth here! Used to be you’d come home and report off to Popi about people you’d met after visiting some other city for him, and you’d tell him everything about them in two or three sentences. Their hair and their shape and their eyes and noses and ears and how they were dressed and I don’t know what all else, till we could see them in our minds as if they were standing there.” And Arêtë gave him an odd look. “You’ve been here for months, but from the sound of you you’d think you hadn’t seen him at all!”

Iaon swallowed. “Arêtë, he’s… He’s kind of hard to describe.” He felt around for a realistic-sounding excuse, and finally decided to fall back on half-truths as his best bet. “For his, uh, his work, he spends a lot of time wrapped up in shadows. It’s often hard to see him at all.”

“Really. Interesting.”

Iaon felt as if his alibis were sounding less solid by the moment. _In fact if I met myself during a case and I sounded like this, I’d start getting suspicious right away. Just tell her what you know!_ “But… well. He’s got dark curly hair. A lot of it, though not all that long, I guess. He’s tall, yes, though maybe not so tall as some people think at first glance. Slender. Not too slender, though. Kind of wiry. Though he never eats enough, not really. Not when he’s working.” If a little annoyance escaped Iaon there, well, never mind, it was true. “Which is mostly.”

“This thing with his shadows, though. Why’s he keep himself wrapped up so much? Is something wrong with his face?”

“His face…” Iaon said, and drank more wine. The strangeness of the tilted eyes, the length and sharpness of that face seen even through shadow, all the things that taken separately would have seemed odd or even unlovely but were so perfect when all taken together—

“Blue eyes? Green? You were always a sucker for green, I remember that…”

“Uh, sometimes. It depends on the light—”

“Is he handsome?”

_He is the most beautiful thing in Heaven and Earth, and as far as I know, in the Realms Below._

_…I think._

“Yes,” Iaon said, “fairly good-looking, I think you could safely say that.” And had some more wine, and smiled.

Arêtë was still giving him that look that said she somehow expected more. “Well,” she said, “he sounds nice.”

Iaon had to chuckle at that. “Nice,” he said. “Um, that might be stretching a point. He’s not always very polite.”

“What special powers does he have?”

“Annoying people,” Iaon said, almost before he was aware of what was coming out of his mouth.

“Well, then you two are pretty much made for each other!” Arêtë said, and laughed.

Iaon had to laugh too, not just because he privately thought she was right about the “made-for-each other” part. It was simply a very Arêtë sort of thing to say, and strangely, he had missed that: her quick tongue, her _genuine_ quality. She was no genius, gods knew, but her heart was sound.

“You may have a point,” Iaon said. “Enough to work well together, anyhow.”

“Tell me about it,” Arêtë said. “Tell me what your work day’s like.”

So Iaon did, in a general sort of way, and it seemed to him that things got better between them as this went on. The wine was loosening both their tongues a bit, and eventually Iaon was able to gently steer Arêtë back to talking a little more about her own life at home, what she’d been doing there, the life and business of the Kingdom. But even this comfort had some discomfort in it, for Iaon now knew he was right in his first impression: Arête utterly loathed being back in the City. Her voice, even relaxed by the wine (and she was being very good, restraining herself so as to be a good guest, he knew) had a constant slight edge to it that Iaon knew he’d never have heard when Arêtë was fully at her ease about a subject. _How am I supposed to explain to her that things aren't going to change? I’m here, and she’s there doing what I used to do… and I can’t give her any hope at all that things will ever get back to what she thinks of as normal._

 _And I don’t_ want _them to!_

They drank their wine and chatted on, and had another course, more robust this time, of beef and hot fresh-baked bread and roast vegetables, that the Thalastrae manifested before them without even being noticed (leaving Iaon wondering _how_ they’d managed that. _Can they make things they touch as invisible as_ they _are? Has this been going on around here all this while? Though if it has, how would I have_ noticed?). And shortly it seemed to Iaon that they were going to need a little break from eating. “I have such a sweet for you in a while,” he said. “The very sweet of sweets, Arêtë, you have _no_ idea. But let’s wait a little for that. I’ll make you tea—”

“What’s tea?”

“You’ll find out. And then I’ll show you around.”

So Iaon made tea (and after some very pronounced nose-wrinkling on Arêtë’s part, realized that she preferred it nearly as sweet as the God did), and then started to give his sister the tour of the House. He was gratified that it took him _somewhat_ longer than the God had predicted… but this was mostly because he was doing what the God likely wouldn’t have thought to do, which was take time to explain everything to her rather than expect her to deduce it herself. He showed her the secrets of the cozy sitting room (at least those that weren’t tidied away). He explained to her how a gaming board had come to be affixed to the wall by the fireplace with a knife, and revealed to her the strange secret of the Epauletted Bat and its nineteen attendant beetles, and the case to the solution of which they had been instrumental. He introduced her to the sagacious Skull, which (once Arêtë had calmed down a bit) addressed her courteously by every one of her proper titles and then murmured something totally obscure about “incomplete quaternities” and fell musingly silent.

This was entirely business-as-usual for the Skull, though, so Iaon thought nothing in particular of that. He just laughed and began telling Arêtë the tale of the aurochs skull between the windows and how the God had come by it: which made her laugh too. He showed her his bedroom—unexciting locality that it was—to let her see that he had all his things, his armour and everything else that was necessary for his work when he and the God were on the road. He showed her Pegasus’s feather. He showed her his gun, which Arêtë regarded with a mixture of wonder and terror that Iaon found difficult to understand (at least as far as the terror went). He showed her the mysteries of the kitchen, of the glowing kettle and the bottomless, backless cupboards, which she found fascinating until suddenly coming across a jar of salamanders’ kidneys that had somehow escaped being tidied up.

And once into the kitchen Iaon found himself forced to spend half his time doing his best to keep her out of the Cupboard that was Cold—for there had been no question of moving its inhabitant: he was a creature of habit, and anyway there wasn’t really any place else for him to be. Arêtë’s suspicions once aroused simply couldn’t be quelled (”I know! Your doesn’t-have-a-name God’s been hiding in there and spying on us!”). And since she was going to get in there as soon as his back was turned, Iaon finally had to break down and tell her _why_ he didn’t want her opening the Cupboard. And then she just laughed at him. ”You are such a _liar_ , Iaon, this God of yours has made you worse than you were when you were ten, and even then you made Odysseus look like a laggard when you got going! There’s something for our lunch in there, isn’t there? Come on, let me see it, it’s that sweet you were threatening me with, isn’t it—!”.

It was the wine that had got her giggly like this, Iaon knew, and he wasn’t far behind her, so he wasn’t able to stop her when she threw the Cupboard open—just doubled over giggling himself. And after one look she slammed the door in poor Heisenberg’s face and lunged for the second amphoriska that was breathing on the side counter in the kitchen. She poured and drank off nearly a whole glass of a truly outstanding and heavyweight Chian, _unmixed_ —then fled into the sitting room railing at Iaon in a combination of shock and outraged hilarity, so that he had to sit her down on the sofa again and collapse by her, unable to say much except “Don’t try to make this my fault, I _told_ you he was bloody!” while she sat there gasping and then got the hiccups.

When the two of them were recovered a little, it seemed to Iaon that the only way he could make up to her for this episode was by introducing the promised sweet—that astonishing cake-thing piled high with a fluffy mixture of butter and sugar and cream, and the space between the layers (each as white and light as any cloud) all stuffed with it too. Iaon had to spend something like ten minutes explaining to Arêtë what butter _was_ and why it was rather nice. She wrinkled up her nose—one of the commonest faces Iaon remembered from his childhood when Arêtë didn’t like the look of something and wasn’t sure how it was going to taste. “And cream, Iaon, seriously, cream is all right but only after it goes into _cheese_ , who’d ever put it in a _sweet—?!”_ Finally Iaon gave up on trying to convince her, and just started eating cake. Soon enough (around his second slice) she followed him, as she always had eventually when they were young and he did something before she did (”Somebody’s got to keep you out of trouble…!”). And for the next little while there wasn’t much sound except Arêtë saying repeatedly, “Oh, my Gods, _Iaon!!”,_ and frankly indulging in some most unprincess-like gobbling.

Eventually they both had had enough, and Iaon went to fetch more tea, and the Thalastrae followed him back into the sitting room with a basin and warm towels for the two of them to clean up after the meal. They wiped themselves off and relaxed again, and a while after the tea a honeyed golden dessert wine manifested itself (and Iaon was astounded and abashed all over again at the subtlety of the Thalastrae’s goings and comings when they didn’t care to be noticed).  And slowly, as if feeling their way, he and Arêtë began talking again: about home, about the family, about how things were going.

But there was a hollowness about the conversation that Iaon increasingly couldn’t ignore. It had been there before the tour of the house, and during it, and now it was even more noticeable. Every time Iaon mentioned the God, he saw Arêtë’s face change: the forced little smile she got when working to be understanding about something, the widened-eyed look that was an eyeroll aborted just in time, the subdued-breath-down-the-nose followed by very-long-drink-of-wine that was Arêtë physically preventing herself from saying anything because what she _wanted_ to say might be hurtful, and she really didn’t want to be.

 _You have to give her credit for that,_ Iaon thought, _if nothing else._ Yet though he hadn’t yet even been able to get her to listen to the explanation of why the God had had to bring him here, Iaon could see that the last thing Arêtë wanted at the moment was him getting into any more detail about the being whom she presently considered the cause of her and Iaon’s problems—in other words, the God. So though he hated downplaying all the glory, all the wonder, the beauty and cleverness and mystery and power of the God and life with him—these being the things that had first made this exile bearable, and then joyous—Iaon began to resign himself to the prospect. But it was hard. _I thought she understood enough about how my heart works to see why I’d be happy here,_ he thought. _And now that idea turns out to be an illusion…_

What Arêtë _did_ want to know was that Iaon was safe and well, and in no immediate danger of death. The latter was another reason Iaon stopped volunteering any more information about casework, as he started to realize that his sister’s picture of him, these days, was of a quiet responsible homebody, careful and thoughtful and dependable and a little plodding.

 _But then what image did she have of any_ other _adult Iaon to compare that against?_ Arêtë had already been off living her Maenad’s life in the mountains when Iaon went to the wars. She could have no true picture of the eager and slightly reckless young man Iaon had become in his life and travels with the Kingdom’s little army—a warrior whole of body, proudly skilled with bow and spear and increasingly good at his healing art, hot for excitement and adventure and glad to have been given a just excuse to seek them out and enjoy them. As far as Arêtë was concerned, war was simply the awful thing that had crippled her brother and then sent him home to settle down. In fact, it looked like “settled down” was what she now thought of as Iaon’s proper state: limping about the City and tending to the family business.

 _While_ she’s _out running up hill and down dale with the other Bacchantes for three quarters of the year, fancy free and half off her head on retsina,_ some cranky part of Iaon’s mind observed. _Instead of settling_ herself _down to live in town and take on her share of the work I’ve been doing all by myself since I came home from the wars that broke me._

He forcefully pushed the thought aside. He’d had it before and probably would again, but this was no time to allow it free rein. To keep the conversation from wandering into less palatable territory, Iaon actually started tempting Arêtë to talk about the present woes of her home life—meaning all his work that she now found herself having to do—while thinking, _The God was right about this meeting. Completely right. And what’s worst about this is that he won’t_ _even be_ happy _he was right. Even in that nasty way he gets sometimes..._

“…and I couldn’t believe it, all the walking around the walls, Iaon, what’s the point of that? I have no idea what to look for, surely one of the senior commanders ought to—”

Arêtë stopped short, her eyes going wide at the sound of a door closing, elsewhere in the House, and then the noise of footsteps coming up the stairs.

“Woo hoo!” said the cheerful voice halfway down the stairs. “Prince Iaon?”

The formality made him smile. “Come on up, Mrs. Hudson,” Iaon called. “We’re just recovering from eating your whole cake as if we were a couple of _starving people with no manners.”_ He threw Arêtë a glance of affectionate reproof that did nothing but make her laugh under her breath.

Other laughter came up the stairs, and Iaon nudged Arêtë and got up. “Come on and greet her,” he said, and Arêtë got up to do so, though Iaon had to wonder why she looked so concerned all of a sudden.

Mrs. Hudson came bustling up the steps in her usual light-and-dark violet household robes, her arms full of a bundle of something. “Well, seriously, Iaon, it’s not as if I made it to be hung on the wall and admired, is it? Cakes are for _eating._ Not that the God normally needs a lot of reminding about that…”

She paused in the doorway for just long enough to look over the scene inside as Iaon and Arêtë got up. “And you’ll be the Princess Arêtë Dasosarchëidë,” said Mrs. Hudson, looking with great pleasure from her to Iaon and back again as she came over to them and she handed Iaon the bundle. “Yes, goodness, there’s no mistaking the resemblance, is there?” She smiled at Arêtë. “You’re most welcome to the House, my dear! Very welcome indeed.”

Arêtë was staring at Mrs. Hudson in utter astonishment, and slowly she sank to her knees. It was such an obeisance as a young person, royal or not, might properly make to a very senior host, and at first glance Iaon approved, though he thought Arêtë might be going just a little overboard. Then, though, he got a glimpse of the look on Arêtë’s face. She was stricken, indeed actually struck silent. And suddenly he realized that Mrs. Hudson was the first immortal Arêtë had _seen_. That shiver of unworldly fire that hung about any God, and the aura of deathless, ageless power that even the godlight could only partly express—  _I’m used to it! I forgot about it, didn’t think to warn her. But_ how _would I have? How do you explain this to someone, tell them what it’s like?_

“Oh my dear, please, come now, none of that,” Mrs. Hudson said, and reached down to take Arêtë’s hands, which were half-raised in front of her as if on their way to being lifted in the full gesture of prayer before an altar. And Arêtë shivered all over, just once, as Mrs. Hudson drew her up to her feet. “You just tell me if there’s anything you need. Was your journey all right? Have you had enough to eat and drink? We’re not in the business of starving our houseguests!”

“Yes, lady, truly, a feast’s worth!” Arêtë said, sounding strange, almost a little faint.

“Well, that’s good. Iaon’s good enough about trying to keep the God fed, but it’s not the same thing at all, that one eats like a bird nine days out of ten and on the tenth I declare he’s like a harpy at an all-you-can-eat buffet! Iaon, what’s wrong dear, isn’t that what you were expecting?”

“What?” Iaon said. “Oh!” He’d been so distracted by Arêtë’s reaction to Mrs. Hudson that he’d hardly glanced at what he was holding. It was an olivewood box, beautifully polished and about a cubit long.

And then he realized what it was, and almost broke out in a sweat of relief. “Oh, gods, Mrs. H., did this just get here now? I’d given up on it!”

“I know, I was waiting for it too! It came with a note, Si said he was _so_ very sorry, the delivery bot got its wires crossed somehow and took this Somewhere It Shouldn’t Have Gone—” Mrs. Hudson’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper as she made a pointing-thataway gesture toward the wall behind the sofa, most likely meant to indicate Olympus out past that side of the property. “He had the most frightful time getting it all sorted out again, he was terrified it’d be too late!”

“No, the timing’s perfect, Mrs. Hudson, thanks so much!”

“That’s just fine, I’ll leave you to it then. So nice to meet you, dear, do enjoy your stay!” And Mrs. Hudson smiled brightly at both of them and headed off down the stairs again.

Arêtë stood staring after her as she went. Iaon looked at his sister with some concern as he headed back over to the sofa. “Come on,” he said, “sit down and have a look at your guest-gift.”

She wandered over and sat down by him with an expression that still looked a bit stunned. “Um. Fine. Thank you.”

“Arêtë?” He peered at her. “Are you all right?”

She took a couple of breaths, gazing into the fire, before she picked up her wine glass and had a long drink. Then she turned to him. “Iaon. Do they all look like that?”

“You mean that… brightness? Pretty much, yes. Some much more than others. Mrs. Hudson’s actually kind of subdued, she’s just a river goddess, whereas the really—”

“Do they all _feel_ like that?” Arêtë was rubbing her hands together as if she very much wanted to get something off them.

“Uh.” (The thought of the quick bracing grip of one of those hands on his shoulder after a hard run, the tingle under the skin even when the hand lay quiet in his as Iaon patched up yet another burn from some mad alchemical experiment… or the slow stroking of strong gentle hands down either side of his spine, trailing after them that unique and beautiful burning-without-pain…) “Yes. More or less.”

“It’s…” She was trying to be polite. “Very odd.”

“It’s something to do with the ichor, I think,” Iaon said. “Not something we’ve really had time to get into.” _Partly because the God starting to experiment on his own blood is something we don’t really need…_ “It goes away after a few moments. Please don’t worry about it.,”

She nodded. “All right,” she said, and had another drink of wine.

“Anyway, I’m so glad this got here! I asked for it for you specially.” He held out the box to her.

Arêtë took it, stroking the wood. “This is so beautiful.”

“Open it!”

She found the delicate little bronze catch on the long side, pulled it open. Inside, pillowed on royal-crimson silk velvet, was a redware amphoriska with a gilt cork-and-wax stopper, and a little golden chain-collar bearing a tag that said 3/1000. The redware was exquisitely embossed and painted on one side with a beautiful black-and-scratchthrough image of Dionysus, dressed in his leopardskin and vine-wreath, picking up a pinecone-tipped thyrsis wand and getting ready to party. All around the rest of the amphoriska from both directions Maenads were dancing to greet him, their robes tucked up, some playing lyres or shaking sistra, their heads thrown back and arms thrown high in the delight of the dance and the vine. 

“Oh, Iaon,” Arêtë murmured, lifting the amphoriska out and passing her hands over the handsome painting and the scribing around the neck. “This is… Thank you, Iaon! What a beautiful thing this is!”

“Inside as well as outside,” Iaon said. “Dionysus’s best.”

Arêtë’s hands went still as she met his gaze again, her eyes going wide. Her mouth made an omicron of astonishment. _“Dionysus!_ You, you _know_ him?”

“You’ve been drinking his wine all afternoon.” Iaon smiled. This, at least, seemed to be going well. “He owes the God a favour from a while back, and the wine cellar’s full of his—”

“You mean you’ve _seen_ him?” Arêtë gulped for air, sounding for a second like she was having trouble getting words out. “Iaon, _what’s he like?”_

Iaon blinked. “I, uh— well, I don’t know him personally, you understand, but I see Silenus pretty often, his pi alpha—”

“His what?”

 _—remember not to mention Olympus, don’t mention Olympus—!_   “His personal assistant. The chap who helps Dionysus out with business. I mean, he’s got a lot on his plate these days, all these dramatic performances he has to preside over, and then there are the religious mysteries and the wine festivals, and apparently he’s got _no_ sense of time or organisation and somebody has to help him keep his schedule straight. I see Si pretty often at the—mmm, with other people—well, not people actually, they’re mostly demigods and nymphs and minor deities of one kind or another. No, of course they’re _people_ , very nice ones, we get together for drinks and so on when they can find a little time off—”

Iaon trailed off. Arêtë was staring at him, actually openmouthed, as if someone had removed her brother and replaced him with— Well, it was hard to tell just _what_. But someone who actually struck her as impressive, as opposed to a brother who’d somehow got himself into a unique and messy sort of trouble from which he couldn’t be rescued.

After a few moments her gaze dropped to the amphoriska again as if she couldn’t really believe in it. “This is—” Arêtë said, and stopped. _Is she actually getting choked up?_ Iaon thought, starting to wonder whether this had been such a good idea at all. “This is the closest I’ve ever been to the God, Iaon. After all this while.”

Iaon held very still, not knowing what to do or say, just watching her. “How many years in the wilderness?” Arêtë said very softly. “Running around in all weathers, freezing or in the heat, in the empty places, the lonely places. Always seeking him. And not finding. Never finding, not even once. And now this…”

Her voice had dropped almost to inaudibility. Iaon could do nothing but look at her and imagine what such an admission must be costing her. 

Arêtë came to herself a little, then, and straightened where she sat. “…But you _could_ see him?” she said after a moment.

Somehow Iaon found his voice again. “Uh, probably, I mean I’d have to check with my own God first—” Quickly he stopped himself, partly because he was hearing himself as Arêtë might hear him: _‘my own God,’ what does it sound like saying that to her when she’s devoted her own whole adult_ life _to Dionysus and hasn’t even glimpsed him on some mountainside or in some passing vision? What have I_ done _here? How do I let her down gently about this? Oh this is_ terrible—

“Look, Arêtë,” Iaon said. “Dionysus is one of the twelve Olympians. The ‘great ones’, as you called them: the mightiest of the immortals. For all his gifts, the Consulting God’s only got so much pull at that level, even with Gods he’s helped. If there’s something you need from Dionysus, if there’s a petition of some sort, a prayer you want him to hear, I can try to help. But I can’t make any guarantees.” He considered adding _And it might not exactly be safe…_ and then decided against it. 

Arêtë sighed and her gaze dropped to the amphoriska again. She spent some moments stroking it reflectively. “Iaon,” she said then, very low. “I feel like an ungrateful wretch.”

“Arêtë, no! Don’t say that.” He reached out to take her hand. “This has to be so much for you to take in all at once.”

She sighed, and carefully put the amphoriska in its box on the low table by the sofa, closing the box: then picked up her wine glass. “This was empty…”

Iaon glanced at it. It was full now, having been refilled without either of them noticing. “They’re really good at that, aren’t they,” he murmured.

Arêtë drank, and then flopped back against the cushions and sighed. “Oh, my Gods, Iaon,” she murmured, rubbing her closed eyes with one hand. “What will I _ever_ tell Mami and Popi about all this?”

“Well,” Iaon said, and cleared his throat a little. “You won’t be telling them anything, as it happens.”

Arêtë dropped her hand and gave him an odd look. “Well, all right, if you don’t want me to, but you know they’d never say anything.”

“No,” Iaon said. “I mean you won’t be able to.” He looked away, embarrassed. “That was part of the price of you coming here.”

She stared with horror at the wine in her hand, and then at Iaon again.

“No, Arêtë, for God’s sake of _course_ not, it’s nothing like that, does this _look_ to you like the bit in the _Odyssey_ with the magic mind-altering drugs?” And when he laughed at the idea, it was at least partly because if anyone knew whether such things existed, or how to get them or use them, it would be the God. He’d certainly slipped some other pretty unusual things into Iaon’s wine over time, after all…  “But the House won’t let you tell its secrets.”

She gave him a scornful look. “Iaon! It’s very nice, I guess—” The glance around her suggested that she was being kind. “But it’s just a _house.”_

Iaon just shook his head. “Mmm, I wouldn’t say that.” It was something he hadn’t spoken of even to the God. But there were times, late at night in his chair, when he could swear he felt the walls of the flat just ever so slightly leaning in toward him—carefully, delicately, like hands cupped around a caught butterfly, aware of their strength and intent on not hurting what was held. It wasn’t at all a bad feeling. He’d felt something similar sometimes when the God lay slouched back in his chair with his eyes closed, plucking idly at his bowed lyre, lost in thought and melody, half asleep, half-smiling. _That sense that the House_ listens _, that somehow it closes its eyes too and smiles, all content._ A strange sense, but hardly impossible… not here. Iaon had quickly learned not to bother applying that label around anything of the God’s. “Trust what I’m telling you, Arêtë. The God says that as far as everything that’s been happening here, you won’t be able to speak of it or write of it, or tell anyone _anything_ of what you’ve seen or heard or done, in any way.”

She gave him one of those rebellious looks that Iaon knew all too well. He sighed. “I know you’ll try! _I’d_ be tempted to, just to see what happened! But I doubt trying’s going to be very pleasant… so if I were you I’d keep the experiments to a minimum.”

Arêtë blew out an exasperated breath between her lips. That sound Iaon knew well, too. Their mother had spent years trying to get Arêtë to stop making it.

“Yes, I know, I sound like a horse,” Arêtë said, catching Iaon’s smile. 

“Didn’t say a word…”

“You didn’t have to.” But somehow she found a smile for him in return.

“Come on,” Iaon said, “no drinking without eating, you know it’s bad for you this time of day. Look at these little crispy things. They’re really light, you’ll like them…”

They slipped back into conversation about home again, but now even more than before Iaon was feeling himself to be walking on uncertain ground. The pachyderm in the room, as it were, the one thing he really wished he could share with Arêtë, was how things really were between him and the God. In his best-case imaginings of this meeting, he’d had the idea that with his own sister, whom he’d supported as best he could during her relationship with Speio, he might reasonably expect that he could say _This is_ my _God, the one I always waited for, the one I thought would never find, but he was waiting for me, he came and found me—_   Yet now the idea of saying any such thing made Iaon wonder what in Heaven or on Earth he’d been thinking of. Now he felt like he’d be rubbing his own fulfillment in his sister’s face. _I have what I always wanted, what I didn’t even_ know _I wanted—what’s been given to me in overflowing measure: this impossible joy. Whereas you have_ nothing _of what_ you _wanted, nothing of what you sought to be._

And he thought of how Arêtë’s face had tightened earlier when he began telling her even casual things about his relationship with the God. _She doesn’t even really want to hear that he’s my friend. How am I supposed to tell her how much more he is than that?_ Especially in view of what she’d just admitted to him about her long unfulfilled search for Dionysus, a devotion apparently completely one-sided. That wasn’t really unusual. Not all Gods were solicitous of their worshippers, even their most devoted ones. But Iaon could hardly avoid seeming, to Arêtë, to have spectacularly beaten the odds. And then to admit that he and the Consulting God were lovers?… _No, best keep quiet about that right now._

Arêtë had gone quiet again for a few breaths after telling him about yet another proposal to move the sheepfold away from one side of the Palace (it hadn’t happened, and Iaon knew in his bones it never would: the market people liked it there). Iaon saw how her gaze had dropped to the glass in her hands again as she stroked her thumbs along the smoothness of it. “Something you haven’t told me yet, Iaon” she said.

“What?”

“Why the Gods took you away from us. _Why_ did they have to do it, Iaon? What was it all about?”

He sighed, and something in the back of his head said, _How many glasses of wine has this been now? Three? Four? Be careful._ But how to handle this question had been on his mind for a good while, and finally here was the time. “It was Death,” Iaon said. “Lord Hades took offense. I saved too many lives, it seems. Cured too many people. Remember how the plague came through a few years ago? And passed us by…”

“But it was a miracle, wasn’t it?” Arêtë said. “Everybody prayed. I remember that time in the Temple of All Gods, and Miki leading the prayers.”

“That was part of it.” Iaon had a long drink of the wine, for the memory of the time still unsettled him. “I was praying as hard as anybody else. I prayed to Aesculapius, so hard. Not just in the Temple, but all that night after. I never—” He shook his head, swallowed. “I came back that night when everybody was gone and I did something I’d never done before, I lay right down on my face on that cold stone in front of the altar and I prayed to the Healer to help us, to tell us what to do.” He shivered: he could still feel the cold of that stone, the grit against his cheek, his terror and hopelessness. “…And then I fell asleep.”

She laughed at him, but not in a shaming way, and for the first time that day so far Iaon felt completely comfortable with her. “Typical. Once get you horizontal and you’re out like a light.”

“Yes, well.” Though Iaon blushed, he laughed with her. “But I had a dream. And a voice said to me, ‘Look to the little things, Prince Iaon. Look to the small things, the very smallest things.’”  And of course he _knew_ that voice now, knew the Healer’s voice firsthand… but he wasn’t going to say anything about that at the moment. “And then you remember when I had to go to Mycenae for Father right after that about the levies, when they really thought they were going to go to war in the middle of a plague, the fools—”

They both made faces at the thought, but Arete’s expression was more about remembered fear than anything else. “And the plague was there too,” she murmured. “Iaon, we were so afraid that if you went there you’d never come home.”

“The thought crossed my mind too. But you know as well as I do that Father _would_ have died if he’d gone. You remember how sick he was then.” Iaon sighed, drank. “So off I went, and delivered Father’s message, and took counsel and gave it. Only place I remember the limp ever doing me much good. The old soldiers take more notice of the young ones if they look like they’ve been through the grinder.” He rolled his eyes. “And then I was in the strangers’ bivouac down in the agora—no bedding down in the great Palace for some upcountry petty nobility like me. _I_ got billeted in a tent and got to like it! And I was fine, except that I’d sooner have been out of there but couldn’t leave until morning, and I felt scared to take a breath half the time, what with the corpses in the streets.”

Arêtë hid her eyes and moaned under her breath. Iaon remembered wishing at the time that he wasn’t a prince and a soldier and supposedly too brave for such things as letting anyone hear evidence of his fear. “And then halfway between midnight and dawn someone set fire to a plagued house down by the marketplace. Trying to cleanse it or having dropped a torch while robbing it, don’t ask me. So much for any more sleep that night! All of us who were bivvied in the market got out in a hurry for fear of embers from the fire falling among the tents. And a lot of us went to the house on fire, as much for warmth as to help keep the fire from spreading around the agora. As it started to die down I saw that there were rats running out of there, some of them on fire. And then, I still don’t know why, I went to look at one of them—”

 _“I_ know why,” Arêtë said, and shivered and made a disgusted face, even as she laughed. “It was always the little animals with you when you were a kid. The rabbits, the birds… I still remember Popi that time you brought home the weasel! Oh gods. But rats, Iaon, _really?”_

He had to laugh too. “Well, yes, I take your point, usually rats are for killing. But this one was dead enough! And I went to it and saw the little things in its fur, burnt too. Fleas, like tiny little drops of tar. They’d been trying to get off the rat, in the face of the fire, the same way rats flee a ship that burns. And then I thought again of the voice that spoke in my dream about ‘the very littlest things’, and I thought, _well, it’d be hard work to get much littler than a flea! So what does this mean?_ And all that morning I thought about it, as soon as I could get poor Strix out of there, _he’d_ been up half the night with all the other horses, screaming at the fire. A total wreck the two of us were. So when we were on the road I walked him half the time, and thought and thought. And after a while it seemed to me that the Healer had been trying to tell me a secret: trying to show me the way without showing his hand. I thought, _well, if he’s trying to say that rats and their fleas are to do with the plague somehow, then one should kill them or keep them away._ And what’s better against a rat than a cat? And the more cats the better…”

“So _that’s_ where the kitten thing came from,” Arêtë said softly.

“And once the kittens were cats, well, we didn’t have any trouble with plague after that, did we? So you were right. It was a miracle. But a sideways one. I get a feeling that the Gods prefer us to be trying to be the miracle ourselves, if we can see a way. They’ve got enough on their plates as it is.”

Arêtë sat there drinking her wine and thought about this. “So you got caught between one God and another,” she muttered. “Typical. They set you up to do something they want and then punish you for doing it.”

Iaon was tempted to start taking that statement to pieces and correcting it, but for the moment he let it go. “What one God wants,” he said, “isn’t necessarily going to make another happy. Seems that’s what happened this time. Death got twitchy about humans possibly no longer respecting him. So he wanted to make this problem—”

“Meaning _you…”_

“—make it go away without actually being seen to be doing anything about it. Because that might have made other Gods think he was afraid of losing power somehow. And he’s not just another God, Arêtë: he’s the King of one of the three great Realms. He doesn’t dare show weakness, or seem to be in incomplete control of his sphere of influence.”

Arêtë was giving him an odd look, but Iaon was sitting there in slight surprise as he listened to what he’d just said. He hadn’t ever consciously codified this business to himself this way, but it was true. Death was a King of a great realm, and _that_ mindset Iaon could understand… even when it turned out that he himself was on the wrong side of it. “It doesn’t matter,” Iaon said at last. “The Consulting God is Death’s godson, and the God was sent by him to stop what I was doing, and if he couldn’t stop it, to kill me. But the God didn’t. Instead he saved my life.” He smiled slightly. “He mostly solved Death’s problem by taking me away from the world of men, away from the healing. He did the next best thing to killing me, without the actual killing.”

 _“Why_ did he?” Arêtë said.

Iaon sat there and gazed down into his wine for a bit: then up into her face. _What do I tell her? Because to this day I can’t certainly say._ On reflex, just for a second, he reached inside him, into that strange place he tended to think of as over the shoulder of his mind, where some small part of the God seemed lately to have taken up residence, and said, _Why? Why_ did _you, beloved?_

But no answer came back: not so much as a whisper.

He was going to have to go with his pet theory. “The God serves great Justice herself,” Iaon said, “and murder and unjust accusation and unnecessary death are all his sworn enemies.”

“But he didn’t do what Death wanted him to,” Arêtë said, looking very uneasy. “Isn’t that going to make trouble for you down the road?”

“Not if Death changes his mind,” Iaon said.

Arêtë snorted at him, for she knew the stories as well as Iaon did, and only in one or two of them out of hundreds had Hades let a soul he wanted walk away. “And what do you, or this God of yours, need to do for _that_ to happen?”

“Well, we’re, uh, working on that.”

She gave him that look—something else from that time when he was nine and she was fourteen—the one that said, _Just who do you think you’re kidding? This is_ me, _Iaon._  

Iaon said nothing, just turned his glass around in his hands for a few moments, giving Arêtë time to go where he needed her to with this concept. _It’s going to be a lot easier if she comes up with it herself…_

“So all this means that for the foreseeable future you just have to keep hiding, doesn’t it,” she said. “It means you can’t come home.” 

“As I said… we’re working on it. I can’t say fairer than that, Arêtë, believe me. My freedom and my safety are on the God’s mind too.” And that was true, though perhaps not as Arêtë would mean it. “He’s been very clever about what he’s done for me so far, and any little thing could change it. I won’t take any action that could endanger everything we’ve done so far.”

“I know,” Arêtë murmured. “I know. But still…” Her expression clouded. “It’s a shame there wasn’t something you could have done to let us know, some way to send a message clear enough to make us all understand that you were all right…”

Iaon said nothing, just drank his wine. But when his gaze tilted up again from the glass, he found Arêtë’s eyes on him, very still, as she analysed his silence, all too familiar to her from the times when they’d been in trouble together as children and learned when and how to keep quiet.

And those eyes narrowed. “You _did_ tell someone, didn’t you.”

Iaon didn’t dare speak.

“You told _them.”_

Iaon tried desperately to think what he could possibly say to smooth the bumps out of this realisation, which he’d hoped desperately wouldn’t come up. He couldn’t possibly share with Arêtë the conversations he’d had with his parents before he left. It would all sound to her like betrayal, even though none had been intended.

Arêtë put her glass down with exaggerated care, and paused, staring at it. “They knew. Didn’t they? They knew, and I didn’t.”

She was waiting. _I’ve got to say_ something…  “Arêtë. It almost didn’t happen, almost wasn’t allowed. And to do it at all there were certain channels I had to go through—”

Arêtë wasn’t listening. “And who else knew besides me? Of course there was someone else you’d tell sooner.” Her eyes sparked with the sudden realization. “Miki, I bet. He had to know. Whenever news comes to the Palace, real news, _important_ news, he’s always in on it somehow.”

“Arêtë—”

“Iaon.” She covered her eyes with one hand for a moment. It was a gesture he knew too well: it was his own. “You’re making it worse.”

He knew she was right but he knew he was right too, and he had to get it across somehow, even if it did make her angry. “Will you _listen_ to me just this once? Even if you _are_ five whole years older than me? We’re not just some family of crofters living out in the woods, and you know it! This is _political_. And if the other Bacchantes…”

Arêtë dropped her hand, pushed herself up off the sofa and started pacing between it and the fire. Her eyes were narrower yet, the anger restrained but only just. “The other Bacchantes were never the issue, Iaon, don’t try that with _me._ You _know_ what it was about! Arêtë, who can’t keep her mouth shut. Who can’t keep a secret. Couldn’t act as if she didn’t know the truth.”

Iaon instantly felt guilty, because it was true. And it was true, too, that his sister never _could_ have hidden the truth: she was self-deluding if she genuinely thought otherwise. Her heart had always been pinned to her sleeve, whether in grief or in joy. From her earliest childhood until she went away, and all the brief times when Iaon saw her afterwards, you could see what was on Arêtë’s mind or in her heart from halfway across the valley.

“You’re so open-hearted, Arêtë,” he said softly. “And don’t think it’s a bad thing. It’s how the Gods made you.”

“Oh, let’s blame _them_ now, shall we.”

Something in the phrasing made Iaon’s breath catch in his chest for a moment. “Blame? No. But the truth will out, with you: all the time. I’m so sorry. But you know it’s so.”

She glared at him, and then caught herself glaring, and dropped her gaze to the table and glared at that instead.

Iaon gulped, but it had to be said, it _had_ to; if she didn’t become clear about this now, it was going to ruin everything. He put his glass down, got up and stepped around the table to go over to her: but the dangerous look she flashed him kept him from doing what he wanted to, taking her hands.

For the moment Iaon just stayed still. “Arêtë, _please_ listen to me. This isn’t some casual bit of taverna news we’re discussing here, some gossip game about who kissed who and who told who and who had some hurt feelings afterwards.  This is _death_ , this is lives ending, maybe a _lot_ of lives ending. Not just me, if word got out, if it made its way to the wrong places! But death for you too, for our mother and father, maybe for the whole Kingdom if Hades decided to be really thorough.”

Arêtë wasn’t moving, wasn’t looking at him. Iaon started sweating cold, because if he couldn’t make her understand this, there’d be no end of trouble, whether she could speak about this place and this meeting or not. “This is _Lord Death himself_ we’re talking about. This is a deity with the power to wipe out a kingdom a lot bigger than ours and then just shrug afterwards! This is more important than any one or two of us, Arêtë, this is our _people_ we’re talking about.”

Arêtë stood silent, her throat working. “‘Our people,’” she said then, when  she had herself in hand again. “It’s always about _them_ , isn’t it. But when is something about _you_ , Iaon? Or me, or how we are with Mami or Popi? When is something about getting to live as a family, to be with each other, and not about how it’s going to affect ‘our people’?”

The temptation to say something cutting about how much time _she_ spent ‘at home with the family’ in a given year, and how she acted when she was there, was so strong. But the dull sad look Arêtë was now leveling at the floor closed a fist around Iaon’s heart and squeezed it. “Arêtë…”

“It’s not fair to you,” she said. “Or to any of us. Our _people—”_ She laughed a small mocking laugh. “Everything we have to do for them: do you imagine they really care it’s _us?_ If we all walked away and let some other royal family come in, some offshoot from Tiryns or Corinth or wherever, ‘our people’ would just shrug and say, ‘Oh well, another lot of kings, big deal.’”

“That’s not the point,” Iaon said. “And you know it’s not. This is the other side of the bargain with those people, Arêtë, whether they particularly like us personally or not, whether we’re interchangeable as royalty or not. _This_ is why we get to live in a palace, or what passes for one in our part of the world! By who we’ve been born to be, whether we like it or not, we’ve become part of the Throne’s promise to do what needs to be done to make our people safe. We’re part of keeping them secure where they live, keeping food in their bellies, keeping them from being hauled off somewhere in chains as slaves to somebody with an army who sees them as unprotected. We’re for keeping them alive. What I’m doing here is just another version of that. And it’s not all terrible. It’s…” He hated the way the circumstance of the moment simply wouldn’t let him share how happy he was. “It’ll be all right,” he said at last. 

But Arêtë shook her head. “Why should it be? How can it be? How should this _not_ hurt?” she whispered. “It’s almost as if you’d _rather_ be in this house than in your own home! Like you’d rather be with this God of yours, after just a few months, than you want to be with your family that misses you, that’s loved you all your life!”

Iaon drew a long breath and tried to master himself. “Arete,” he said as gently as he knew how, “that really doesn’t matter. One way or another, for the foreseeable future, my life _is_ going to be here. I’m sorry.”

 _No you’re not!_ said the heart inside him, suddenly angry. And “No you’re not!” Arêtë said, in a tone more wretched than angry. “Don’t say it when you’re _not!_ How can you be sorry when this is the kind of thing you always wanted when you were little, something out of the stories, like Athena and Odysseus, some god and some mortal running off on adventures together? Don’t _lie_ , Iaon.”

Iaon had no answer for that. _But why can’t she put the two sides of this together?_ he thought, upset and confused. _She always wanted me to be happy. Especially after the war, when I came home and she saw I was so miserable, how everything I’d been until then was lost to me. If she sees that this is making me happy—how can she not_ want _it for me… if she really does love me?_

They just stood looking away from each other for some moments. Iaon’s glance went to the windows, and slowly he realized that the light outside had changed. It was glowing golden, but an odd dim sort of gold as the sun started leaning down into the wall of mist around the house. For all the moments during which time had seemed to crawl, the afternoon had actually gone by with amazing speed.

“Arêtë,” Iaon said at last “My being here and not there does _not_ mean I love any of you less. How could it? Something like that doesn’t just vanish because you’re away for a while, any more than it did when I was away with the army! And it doesn’t mean I don’t think about you, or home, or Father and Mother. You have no idea how much.  —Which reminds me. Half a moment—”

He stepped away to rummage in the sofa-side drawer of the partner desk for the precious thing he’d left there, and turned back to Arêtë again, holding it up to catch the diffuse afternoon light. In his hand the vial gleamed more silver than golden, even in that glow: there was no mistaking the way its content seemed to have a light of its own about it.

She gazed at it in astonishment. “What is it?”

“Medicine for Father,” Iaon said. “Aesculapius compounded it.”

Her mouth actually fell open. “Oh, _Iaon.”_ Her voice went hushed: she reached a hand out and stopped half way, as if afraid to touch it.

“No,” Iaon said. “Take it. You’re the only one who can safely bring it to him.” 

She took it, reluctantly, and gazed at it lying in her hand. Truly it was a beautiful thing, the long crystal vial with its delicately scratched markings. Iaon had watched Aesculapius engrave them with a diamond-tipped stylus in his firm clear hand: the cup, the waves that symbolized water flowing into it, the number three, the three tiny drops, the picture of the sun, the image of an empty vial:  three drops in water three times a day until completed. Iaon handed her the little bag he’d made for the vial, a slim sewn-together leather sleeve with a drawstring. “Take it to Miki,” Iaon said. “You won’t have to explain anything.”

“Good thing, because I won’t be able to, will I,” Arêtë said, sounding bitter.

Iaon writhed inside. “He’ll know what to do.”

Arêtë sighed. “Iaon… I guess I understand. I have to, don’t I? But I don’t have to like it.”

“Do you think,” Iaon said, “that if I could safely go to Father myself and bring him this, I wouldn’t do it in an eyeblink? But that would undo everything I’ve done to keep my family and my City safe so far. And everything the God’s done to help me keep all of you safe. Even meeting with you like this is a risk, for both of us. But I had to do something, Arêtë. I—” _don’t say ‘I saw you’—!_ “I knew you were hurting. I had to let you know.”

She looked at the vial and sighed, went to put it down on top of the box with the amphoriska. “You’re right,” she said, very softly, after a moment. “It really is a lot to take in. Finding out that your brother’s fallen into some kind of legend… And one where you don’t know how it’s going to end.”

He nodded, reached out and took her hand. “It’s not going too badly so far,” he said, and found a smile somewhere. “Puzzles and dangers and close shaves and miraculous escapes…”

Arêtë gave him a thoughtful look, those expressive eyebrows going up. “Not that kind of escape,” Iaon said, and covered her hand with his other one. “Sometimes you have to be where your duty says you have to be: where life puts you. Here I am. That’s all there is to it.”

Arêtë shook her head, smiled to match his own: rueful, resigned. “All right,” she said. “For now.” She took his other hand, grasped both his with hers, shook them a little. It was the old “Just the two of us against the world” gesture from when they were too young to understand that the world had them outnumbered.

Then Arêtë sighed. “Iaon,” she said. “The privy. I’m nigh to bursting.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yes, I was kind of wondering where you were keeping it all...”

That broadened her smile, and Iaon’s directly after. He gestured past the kitchen with his chin. “Down the hall: that door on the left. Just sit down on that white ceramic chair with the water in it and do what’s needed. When you’re done, there’s a sort of chain business hanging down. Pull on it and watch what happens.” And he grinned. _“Be standing up.”_

Arêtë nodded and went. 

Iaon stood there a while just gazing out through the window into the brassy light lying over the garden, not seeing anything. _This has been completely wrong,_ he thought once more. _Despite the good it will do: it’s been wrong from beginning to end. And I need to tell him so… tell him he was right._

A second later there came a touch on his arm. Iaon turned. Hanging there in the air by him was a long narrow box, just large enough to take one of the House’s wine glasses wrapped up in something soft. In his ear a voice whispered, ever so softly, “Time.”

He nodded, and took the box. “I know. Thank you.”

After a little while from down the hall he heard the flush. Shortly he heard Arêtë’s footsteps coming back, and turned to speak to her—then stopped short, for she looked incredibly stricken all of a sudden. “Arêtë? What? Did something go wrong in there—” But her robes were dry. _Unlike mine the first couple of times—_

“Iaon,” Arêtë said, coming to a stop in the doorway to the sitting room, and sounding very sad. _“When did I get so old?”_

He just stared at her, confused. _She was fine. She was fine until she went into the bathroom._ And he couldn’t understand it…

Until suddenly he could. A memory surfaced from what seemed ages ago, going back to one morning soon after Iaon first came to the House. For his first few days there, the mirror over the basin where one washed one’s hands had seemed to him just another of its unfathomable marvels. It was miraculously wrought of the smoothest and clearest glass laid over some kind of bright metal, and was clearer to look in and more perfect than the stillest water, the brightest-polished bronze shield. Iaon had gazed on it with wonder, the first few times he was in there to bathe, and that was all. But eventually he had to scrape his stubble down before it got out of hand, and when he went in there to do that, in the mercilessly clear magical light from the sconces on either side of the mirror, suddenly Iaon found himself seeing every scar, every flaw and imperfection on his face, every single wrinkle, with terrible and unavoidable clarity.

He’d met the eyes of his reflection in that mirror, and they were sad eyes, frightened eyes, terribly mortal, _old_. It had taken him a good while to come to terms with that reflection, and had left him thinking (for some days anyway) that it might be one of the Gods’ minor mercies that mirrors so devastatingly truthful were nowhere to be found in the world. Perhaps immortals, immune to the ravages of age, could bear what they saw in such things. But for mortal men, being told with such callous clarity what they truly looked like to their fellow men and women was a bitter business. That first glimpse had left Iaon thinking, _Whatever in the world can a beautiful deathless God want with_ me?

Eventually he’d learned not to look so deep: to just shave and wash and get on with business. Eventually it had stopped mattering, or he thought it had. Yet not until after the God first brought him into his Chamber, not until that shadowed yet glorious nakedness had come to stand behind him one morning, facing the mirror with him, and had slipped slim strong arms around him and bent to bury his face between Iaon’s neck and shoulder, murmuring “Blinded, my Iaon. Blinded with the sight of you…” and then even lower, in his ear, quoting the greatest mortal Poetess, whispered _“You burn me,”_ their eyes meeting in ultimate understanding… not until then, seeing in that mirror the oneness of the two of them, had Iaon truly managed to make his peace with that too-clear truth. 

But no one was in any position to do anything of that kind for Arêtë.

She came now to stand by him, looking out the window into the slowly fading golden light and toward the wall of mist, and linked her arm through his. “Are you all right?” Iaon said.

She sighed. “Were you?” Arêtë said.

Iaon tilted his head toward her. “It passed. I got on with things.”

Arêtë nodded. “So will I.”

They looked out the window in silence for a few moments more. “Arêtë, forgive me, but it’s getting to be time for you to go,” Iaon said at last. “You can’t stay past sunset. It’s not permitted.”

Arêtë looked around at the sitting room with a strange expression, a sort of resignation. “All right. Come on, then. Walk me out.”

Iaon picked up the two boxes, giving Arêtë the medicine vial to tuck away in the pouch that hung from her girdle. “Please thank your ladies for me,” she said.

“I will.”

They went down the seventeen steps, Arêtë first. “You should get the workmen in about that one,” she said as she hit the step that squeaked.

Iaon smiled. “I suppose we should,” he said. It wasn’t worth starting a discussion with her on the subject of why that step would never be repaired and what it privately meant to Iaon and the God: a kiss stolen on the stairs after a late return to the House, a creak of wood as one of them shifted weight and groaned in arousal right in time with it, their shared hungry laughter in the dark. _And there you have it in a nutshell,_ Iaon thought. _The kind of thing that might help her make sense of everything that’s happening is exactly what you absolutely cannot tell her._

The door swung open for them: Arêtë watched it, caught halfway between fascination and suspicion. Together they went out and stood on the doorstep. High above the walls of mist the sky’s gold was tarnishing to bronze, and all the rose bushes looked dully metallic and artificial in the odd diffuse light.

Iaon glanced over at the hive. If anything it was more silent than it had been in the morning, so he simply took Arêtë’s arm and walked her down past it, down the white stone walk.

“It’s no point you even telling me to tell them you send your love, is it,” Arêtë said. “I won’t be able to say a thing.”

Iaon thought about that for a moment. “I suspect,” he said, “you’ll be able to tell them _that_. Because whether I was alive or dead, that would still be true.” He sighed. “Arêtë, you’ve got to believe me: my—” He was about to say “being here” and stopped himself, because he didn’t want to start getting into last-minute explanations about where “here” was. “My situation’s on a knife edge, some ways. It may change for the better without warning. But if anything in the mortal world happens to shift things, it’ll almost certainly change for the worse. Meaning I might truly wind up dead… and after that, the really bad things start happening. This is as much for my protection as our Kingdom’s.” 

She laughed a little as they started walking again, and it was a broken kind of sound that badly twisted something in Iaon’s heart. “All right,” Arêtë said. “I know all this is happening, I know this is real. But it’s still all so hard to believe. Gods and potions and invisible servants and magic spells—” She glanced back toward the House, and shook her head. “Iaon, it’s _hard.”_

Iaon sighed, thinking of the view that his sister could by no means be shown: Olympus, breathtaking, literally awe-inspiring, towering over them in the sunset. If only she could see that…

But it was impossible. And there was the real heartbreak for him: that he had what she never would. Better not to wish for any fuller revelation of how much she would not have in her life, probably _could_ not have, ever. _It’s not just that she has to let you go;_ you _have to let_ her _go. And it’s turning out to be harder than you thought._

“Iaon,” she said as they came down to the end of the path, between the pillars, and stopped. “I have to say this.”

“Tell me,” Iaon said. “Whatever it is.”

“This hasn’t really gone right, has it?” She was shamefaced.

 _We are so alike, some ways,_ Iaon thought, and ran a hand through his hair, helpless. “No. No. maybe it hasn’t.”

“I need… I just need time. To come around to all this, to get used to it.” She looked up into his eyes. “Promise you’ll let me come see you again.”

The promises, all the promises. _Promise me you won’t scare her. Promise me you’ll never try to see my face._ Why was he feeling so chained down by them, all of a sudden?

Iaon didn’t say anything right away: and then stood there just burning up with shame that he didn’t immediately answer _Yes, of course you can come._

Arêtë looked away. “Just once more,” she said, very low. “You’ll want to know how the medicine worked on Popi.”

Nor could he say _It’s all right, I don’t need you to come here for that, I can see the results perfectly well, we have a magic window…_ The shame just kept getting worse, burning him up—that she felt she had to beg him, that she had to say something like that to get him to let her come back. _Your own sister._ All the voices in the back of his head that stood for home and family were shouting, _What kind of man treats his own kith and kin so? What are you becoming? Whatever it is, it’s not good! You’re good at being the God’s conscience but not worth much as your own—_

“Of course,” Iaon said.  “Of course you can.” Strange how saying it didn’t at all ease the lump of discomfort and shame that lay in his chest like lead. “When?”

She thought. “Next sacrifice,” Arêtë said. “A couple of weeks. They’ll understand if I want to do it a little sooner than planned. The weather’s close to turning anyway.”

“Yes,” Iaon said, “that makes sense.” “He swallowed. “I’ll know when you’re coming. We’ll do it the same way.”

That was when he caught the slight glow in the mist before them: some strange refraction-inward of the sunset outside the wall of fog as a shape carved out of wind came walking out through it, and the fire of it caught softly in the  outer sheathing of air that West Wind wore like a khiton. “Here’s Westie now,” Iaon said. “Are you ready?”

“A little more this time,” Arêtë said, her gaze following Iaon’s. “At least I know what to expect.” Her mouth went a little grim.

“Arêtë,” Iaon said, suddenly feeling slightly exasperated. “He’s a nice god. Seriously. _No kicking.”_

She gave him a dubious look. “Nice is as nice does,” she said. “We’ll see.”

Iaon just shook his head and waited for Westie to finish emerging from the mist—or enough for a little of it to cling around him and show his shape a little. “Here,” Iaon said, and steadied her as Westie bent to boost her gently up into the carry.

There she hung in the air, her arms full of boxes clasped close. Iaon leaned in to hug her. “Sister mine,” he said in her ear. “Safe journey.”

“My dear brother. Thanks so much for your welcome,” she said, hugging him back one-armed. Iaon had to close his eyes, for he could hear her working to keep the tears out of her voice as she pulled his face to hers, kissed his cheek.

He did his best not to startle—it was so strange, these days, feeling any kiss that didn’t have the sweet soft burning of divinity behind it—and kissed her back. “Until our next meeting,” Iaon said, and stepped back.

A glance from her as Westie turned and stepped up into the wall of mist, and she was gone.

Iaon sighed and turned away from the wall.

Almost as if his sigh was a signal, things shifted. The mist around the House swirled, started thinning, sinking away. Only a few more breaths’ time, it took, before warm light began burning through the barrier, before the wall melted through translucence, into transparency, into nothing. Above Iaon, the glow of sunset stone—gray for the mountain’s crags, white for the Gods’ houses and courts and temples—lay revealed again against the hard blue of the autumn-afternoon sky; everything hard, true, sharp-edged and real, spearing up into a blinding glory near the Mount’s crest where the uppermost dome of the palace of the King of the Gods caught Apollo’s westering fire and vibrated against the blue like something alive.

“Iaon—”

He didn’t jump at the voice: he’d heard the House’s door open behind him some moments before, and had known what it meant. “Thalastrae,” he said sadly. “Turns out there are all these questions I really ought to have asked you. Assuming it’s all right to. But I never did, never thought to. Just took you for granted.”

Suddenly he could hear them all around him. “Please don’t be upset, Iaon!”

“You’ve got nothing to be upset about.”

“Nothing at all!”

“Then… _is_ it all right to ask? Why _are_ you all invisible?”

“We were putting him off his work,” one of Thalastrae said.

“It was easier not to be seen,” said another.

“And we kind of got into the habit…” said a third.

“But you don’t have to not be seen around me if you don’t want to!” Iaon said.

“Oh, but you know how it is—”

“—habits are so hard to break—”

“—and if he should come along without warning all of a sudden—”

“— _he’s_ such a creature of habit sometimes, too, you _know_ him, Iaon—”

It was as if they were desperate to spare him embarrassment. “All right, all right!” he said at last. “But look… if I should have asked a long time ago… I’m sorry.”

“Iaon. It’s not a problem!”

“We’re here by choice. We _like_ what we do.”

“It’s how we help the Work!”

“And after all, he’s the only one who knows how to do what he does. The only one in the _world….”_

“It’s a privilege, an _honour_ to be invisible around him.”

Iaon had to laugh at that. In some of the God’s moods, as solid as he might think he was, Iaon was as invisible as any of them. “You’ve got a point,” he said. “All right, then. It’s all fine.” 

They touched him again, then: more than one of them at once, which was unusual… and at least one of them kissed him on the cheek. He smiled and blushed a little. “Good,” Iaon said, “that’s good. So let’s all go in and get settled down.”

“Do you want anything to eat?”

Iaon had to laugh at that. “Oh gods no! After everything we had for lunch? And that whole cake! I can’t imagine what Mrs. Hudson’ll say.”

“She’ll ask if you want another!”

He laughed again. “Probably.”

They flocked on ahead of him, chatting to each other, and the relief that came with hearing their voices again was nearly palpable. The door of the House opened for them again, and Iaon dawdled along behind them, pausing by the hive, from which the humming was growing louder again.

“I am the stupidest mortal in Heaven and on Earth and doubtless in the Realms Below,” he said under his breath.

There was no overt response from the Bees. Possibly they were being kind.

Iaon headed on up to the doorstep, and the House’s door, which had just shut, opened again for him. He paused there a moment with one hand on the doorjamb, wondering what questions he ought to have asked in _this_ regard that he’d never thought to. There had been times when he’d thought that the House had, in some strange way, been waiting for him as the God had. No question, the God was the House’s Master. But the House had changed slowly since Iaon had come: it had another charge now. And who knew if it had been waiting for some acknowledgement? 

“You take such good care of us,” Iaon said under his breath as he stood on the doorstep. “And I’ve never even said ‘thank you.’ So… Thank you.”

No answer. _Was I really expecting any? Hardly._ …But did the doorjamb feel a little warmer under his hand than it had a right to, this time of day? 

Iaon shook his head, patted the doorjamb and went inside and up the stairs.

There in the sitting room, his back to the slanting sunset light in the windows, the God sat in his chair by the fire as if he’d never been gone, gazing into the air with his hands steepled, very still. Iaon stood in the doorway for a breath or two, looking at him.

The God’s head turned at last, his gaze meeting Iaon’s out of his shadows: but his eyes were hard to see as he lowered his hands. “Are you all right?”  he  said, his voice very low.

Slowly Iaon went to his own chair, dropped a hand to the back of it, stood there a moment as he thought about it. “Not particularly.”

The God’s gaze rested on him, assessing. “I did warn you,” he said, “that this wasn’t going to go the way you expected.”

Iaon sat down across from the God, heaved a sigh and looked up. “Yes, you did. And you were completely right; right on every count. I was an idiot ever to doubt you. And I’m sorry.”

As Iaon had thought, there was no sign that the God particularly enjoyed this admission. He dropped his hands to the arms of his chair, stretched a little “Well,” the God said, “at least this is handled now.”

“Uh...” Iaon said. “Not precisely.”

That gaze hooded itself once more. “She’s coming back, then.”

“Just one more time: in a couple of weeks. She has one more sacrifice to make, and she wants to let me know how our father responds to the medicine.”

The God nodded. “Iaon…”

Iaon tensed a bit, waiting for the rebuke. But it didn’t come. “Let it be as you say,” was all the God said at last. “Some things must be as they are. This business will find its end soon enough, and when it does we can bring our full attention back to the Work.”

Iaon sighed again, nodded. “And not a moment too soon.”

He closed his eyes, let his head tip back against the back of his chair and just tried to feel the House’s peace around him, for at the moment he really needed it. When he opened his eyes again, things were darker. Shadow was wrapping warm around him, draping itself softly over his shoulders, laying itself across his lap; and its source stood beside his chair now, gazing down at Iaon, silvery eyes gone a little golden through their own shadows in the slowly dimming sunset light. “My Prince,” the God said. “What do you need?”

Iaon laughed once, a laugh that even to him sounded a bit broken, and shook his head. “Evidence that someone cares about me in some way I can _understand_ would be nice…”

The God’s hand reached down to his: and oh, the delight of feeling that familiar subtle fire under the skin that touched him, as those long strong fingers laced through his. “Come then,” the God said, tugging Iaon up by that hand, out of the chair and into his arms. “Evidence? The very heart of the Work, my Iaon.  Come let me present mine, and you’ll tell me if you understand it.”

 ***

It was always difficult to judge how time ran in the Chamber. All Iaon was sure of when he was later in a condition or a position to assess such things was that a fair number of hours had passed… but how many, he couldn’t be sure. What he _was_ sure of was that he felt ready to melt straight into or through their couch in the aftermath of what the God had done to him, very slowly and with such exquisite attention to detail as Iaon couldn’t remember ever having been lavished on him before. He was sure he had bones inside him someplace, but he couldn’t feel them or move them. This was possibly because his brains were still vibrating somewhat with the last of the three spectacular orgasms the God had visited on him, the third one amazingly delayed and profoundly prolonged.

“I’m a puddle,” Iaon said eventually.

“Several puddles, surely,” murmured the God, who was lying half-draped over Iaon, his lips pressed to Iaon’s chest. 

“Don’t know if the evidence persists to support the thesis,” Iaon said, for their couch tended to be on the fastidious side: wet spots were not allowed to stick around… so to speak. “But if that’s how _you_ deduce it, then it must be so.”

“Mmm.”

Iaon smiled. His contribution to the proceedings had not consisted _entirely_ of passive ecstasy, and he’d caught the God by surprise at least once; the infliction of multiple orgasms was not exclusively the purview of Deity.

“So tell me,” Iaon said, getting one arm working enough to bring it up and stroke it through those dark and somewhat sweaty curls. “What were you at today?”

“Mmm. …The Danaïds,” the God murmured after a moment or three. “I know how it was done. Sure of it. Just have to prove it now. Legwork…”

He yawned sideways, not even lifting his head. A pang of guilt squeezed Iaon’s heart. _My fault for making him stay out all day,_ he thought, _instead of relaxing here and recovering from everything he was doing all last night._

“First thing,” Iaon said, briefly relocating enough bone and muscle to pull the God a little further up him so that he could pillow that beautiful face on his shoulder and press his lips into the God’s hair. “Wake me up the very first thing, as soon as _you_ wake up, and we’ll get right on it.”

The God opened his mouth and paused, as if considering carefully what he was about to say… and then emitted one of those long soft snores that were his specialty.

Iaon’s smile went gentler as he settled back among the cushions, wishing he could just fall asleep as the God had. But it wasn’t on for him, not tonight. His mind kept going round and around about all the things that earlier could have been said, should have been said, and weren’t: no time, no opportunity, the wrong mood. _Well, she’ll come again._ But at the bottom of his mind was the sense that all day long, despite all his good intentions, he’d been missing something basic about Arêtë, something vital.

 _I think maybe I had this idea that we were just going to throw ourselves into each other’s arms and have a cry and then everything would be all right._ Iaon wobbled his jaw experimentally from side to side, winced. No, _that_ was going to need another day or three to feel better: he’d want some of that willow bark infusion in the morning for sure.

He thought of Arêtë, well home by now—for Westie had brought her directly there, Iaon not wanting to take the chance that something untoward might happen to that precious medicine or Arêtë’s guest-gifts on the road. _Possibly on her own couch by now,_ Iaon thought. _And probably after an evening of trying to tell Mother and Father what she saw, what she did._ He hoped that the attempts wouldn’t have proven _too_ painful. _But no way she was ever going to take my word for that. This is_ Arêtë _we’re talking about: tell her “no” and she can’t wait to test it. Doubtless I’ll hear way too much about it when she’s here again._

Iaon sighed. _This was just so strange, though. Yes, we’ve grown apart over the years. Couldn’t really be helped, bearing in mind how different the paths we’ve chosen have become._ But he kept seeing some of her expressions as she looked around the sitting room, ate, drank, listened to Iaon’s tales, and he found them just so… peculiar. The tightness around the eyes, the set of her mouth.

 _Almost as if she was, I don’t know…_  jealous.

Iaon closed his eyes again and saw Arêtë as she had been. The gangling laughing tomboy, daring him into adventures, racing deer-fleet across the meadows outside the City with him following as fast as he could in her tracks; the wild young woman, plunging into the mad Maenad life that was all the danger a girl of her age and in her position could possibly hope for. And finally the proud, sad woman driven from the path of her choices onto the narrower one that Iaon had walked. _Angry, yes. Rightfully so, I suppose. And upset to find out what had to happen to keep my secret. And both of us had had… well, enough wine._

The old saw about how there was sometimes truth in wine ran through the back of his mind. At the thought, though, Iaon breathed out in annoyance at himself. He thought about the sister who’d fussed over his scrapes and bruises when he’d been little and had fallen chasing after her;  about the young woman who (when she’d heard he’d been brought home from the battlefield) had rushed back and with such embarrassed tenderness helped nurse him past the worst of the long sickness of both body and heart that beset him in the wake of his wounding. It would never be Arêtë’s way to want to deny him the joy that had come to him simply because hers seemed to have been denied her by a twist of fate. Great-hearted he’d called her, and that was surely true of her in this way just as in the other. _Jealous?_ _Ridiculous. Not Arêtë._

He sighed. _It’ll be all right, or as all right as it can be. We’ll meet one last time. She’ll take away with her afterwards enough certainty to find her peace… and that’ll be the end of it. Just as would have happened had she wed, our ways will part._

 _Meanwhile… enough for one day. Enough._ Wearily Iaon turned against his God’s warm body, slipped arms around him and closed his eyes, and before too long sleep folded him in its soft wings and drew him down.

But even Iaon’s deepening union-of-the-heart with a grandson of Mnemosyne was not  enough to impart to him any of the God’s gift for deleting memory; so that however he might have desired to banish them, even in Iaon’s dreams that night some of Arete’s words kept on softly whispering themselves to him in the darkness. Born of the same blood as he, coming from one too close to him to be seen as dangerous, all through the night those words drifted down through the gulfs of Iaon’s sleep like a slow dark snow. Softly his sister’s words came to rest at last, settling onto the fertile unguarded places at the bottom of Iaon’s soul. And there secretly and silently they put down roots, and quietly, in the dark, began to grow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Notes for chapter 31](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/76957435504/till-we-have-cases-chapter-31-notes-and-links) can be found at [the Lotus Room blog,](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com) along with maps, character info, and other resources.


	32. Of A Morning’s Questions and an Afternoon’s Answers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _**In this chapter:** _ In the wake of the disruptive visit from Iaon's sister Arêtë to the House of the Two Hundred Twenty-One Bees, the Consulting God and Prince Iaon get back to the Work and begin investigating the case of forty-nine women who may have been wrongly condemned to Hell...
> 
>  **Warnings for:** lots and lots of bones (not gory), royal visits and cattle breeding, professional philandering and _lèse-majesté,_ early eugenics, atypical wine tasting, and big trouble beyond the eastern horizon.
> 
> **As always, thanks again to[Ivyblossom,](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyblossom) the α of βs!**

The next morning the God woke surprisingly early, leaping up from their couch and vanishing out into the flat as if none of the previous day’s ructions had even occurred. Iaon took a while catching up with him, as however the God’s constitution might be reacting, his own was taking its time about getting rolling again. Leaving his aching jaw out of the reckoning, he felt distinctly bruised in mind and soul. _Tea,_ Iaon thought. _Before anything else whatsoever._ _Tea_ _…_

Rubbing his face, Iaon felt about in the shadows of the Chamber for his bathrobe, wrapped it around him, and wandered into the kitchen, paying only marginal attention to the God talking to someone or something in the front room. There was no sign of the Thalastrae; possibly they were out at the Tesko, as Iaon noticed while getting down the tea crock that some of the cupboards were looking a little more bare than usual.

Iaon glanced into the sitting room. The God was stalking back and forth in his dressing gown, talking text into the air at high speed, but not the normal kind of text: it looked like birds and squiggly lines and stick figures and fragments of shattered mechanical devices. _Well, you knew this was something to do with Egypt, after all,_ Iaon thought, and turned his attention back to the cupboards. _Where did I leave that willow bark_ _…?_

He opened another cupboard and went rummaging among the bags and sacks of herbs and spices, the jam pots and condiment crocks and other storage paraphernalia. _Now where have you—aha, there you are!_ He pulled down the little sack that held the dried, shredded bark, then opened the cupboard next to it to get out another mug for the infusion.

The strange, faint little sound from the cupboard stopped him. _Now what the—_

He stared. The thin, faint sound kept going. Iaon put down the willow-bark sack and reached up to the container that had been sitting beside it, pulling it down. It was a broad ceramic crock with what appeared to be a cork lid on top. _Now why does this look familiar?_

Cautiously—because Iaon had learned over time to be cautious about these things—he pried the lid loose, pulled it up, peered inside.

He blinked as the tiny, faint sound scaled up a little bit. _Oh no,_ was his first thought, now _I know why I thought I recognized this_. And then, _Boy,_ _it_ _’s a good thing Arêtë didn’t stumble across_ this _yesterday_ _…_

Iaon suddenly found himself frowning. _Ar_ _êtë?_ he thought. _Well, you know what about that?_ No _. There_ _’s a subject that I’m going to give the next few days off, because damn it all it feels like I’ve spent_ days _thinking of almost nothing else and I can bloody well use a break._

He sighed and just stood there for a few moments while letting his face relax back into an expression less strained. “My God,” Iaon said at last, “have you had a look in here the last few days?”

The rapid-fire texting paused, though the God didn’t look towards him. “What? No.” The texting started up again.

“Mmm.” Iaon cleared his throat, working out how to proceed. “Remember how we talked about these open-ended experiments… and about not leaving them unattended for too long?”

“However could I forget?” the voice from the sitting room drawled. “So utterly riveting a topic, my Prince, I’m sure it’s etched on my forebrain.”

“Well,” Iaon said, “you might want to do some re-etching, because it looks like you’ve created life in here.” He was tempted to add _Again!,_ but thought that might be pushing his luck. It was more important to actually make some kind of behavioral change then to get diverted into petty point-scoring.

The texting stopped once more as the God’s face turned toward him. “Oh? Did it speak to you?”

Iaon peered into the jar, tilting it gently and squinting to try to get a better view. “No. But whatever’s going on in there, it doesn’t sound terribly happy.”

“Creation angst,” the Consulting God said, waving a hand as he turned away again. “Let it be; it’ll get over it. When it starts talking to you, that’s when you start paying attention. Though if starts praying, _then_ you’ve got some cause for concern. Meanwhile don’t worry about it.” The God finished his text and waved it out the window and on its way.

The Prince pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut, smiling and shaking his head. Once upon a time, something like this—once he was past the initial shock—would have left him chuckling for hours. Now… now it just didn’t seem so funny. But then the past couple of days had made serious inroads into his normal sense of humour. _Give it time_ _…things will get back to normal. I hope._

Iaon sighed, put the lid back on the crock, and put it back up on the shelf where he’d found it. “Tea?”

“Thank you,” the God said politely enough, but plainly running on automatic while his attention rested elsewhere.

Iaon busied himself with that for a few minutes, and with a concentrated infusion of the willow bark which tasted no less foul than it had the last time he’d been forced to it. When he came into the sitting room at last with a second mug of tea, the God was stretched out in his chair again with a pile of tablets in his lap, looking at the topmost of them with as sour a scowl as if it had somehow offended him. “So,” Iaon said, sitting down in his own chair and handing the God his tea. “Egypt?”

The God nodded, the half-seen glint of his eyes focused over Iaon’s shoulder on something else entirely—another place, another time. “But not right away,” he said. “Argos first.”

Iaon raised his eyebrows at that: it was rare for them to start an investigation so close to what had, for him at least, been home. “All right. Talk me through it?”

“Certainly,” the God said, “but for this one you’re going to need a visual aid.” He handed Iaon the tablet on the top of the pile.

Iaon took it and studied it for a moment. “Genealogical chart,” he said.

“See that, you’ve scaled new heights of observation and you haven’t even had your tea.” The God rolled his eyes, had a long drink from his own mug and rested it on the shut tablet topping the ones in his lap. “Right at the top, there, we go all the way back to an Argive girl: who knows, maybe even a distant relative of yours. Her name was Io, and she was a nymph, a daughter of the river god Inachos.”

“Of course, the poor lass who got turned into a cow,” Iaon said. “Seriously, what is it with gods and turning people into animals?”

“King Zeus thought it was a good idea at the time,” said the God, and Iaon didn’t need to see the God’s face at _all_ to know what he thought of that.

“Oh, yeah, right, the way he did that time he turned himself into a beautiful bull and carried off Europa,” Iaon said. “Honestly, and you tease _me_ about the barnyard-animal stuff. What _is_ it with him and cattle? …On second thought, never mind, forget I asked! Because _you_ probably know, and I don’t _want_ to.”

The God’s wicked smile could be felt right through his shadows. “It would be most unwise to breathe a word outside the walls of the House that protects us of a topic that would doubtless be adjudged at the very least _l_ _èse-majesté_ and possibly even blasphemy… but there’s a terribly persistent rumor that Zeus Cronidês, King of Kings, Lord of Lords and sky god _extraordinaire,_ is actually fairly closely related to a strain of Indo-European fertility and agricultural gods. In the Zend-Avesta it says—”

Iaon waved one hand hastily. “Nonono, I don’t care _what_ it says in the Zend-Avesta, God of mine! What it says in the Big Book of Prince Iaon Dasosarchëidês is that there are really some things it’s better for mortals not to know! So just _stop_.” He took another drink of his tea to try to get some control over the laughter that wanted to come bubbling up. “Let me guess, though—”

“Such a dreadful habit, Iaon.”

“All right, deduce then. The problem was Queen Hera, wasn’t it.”

“Quite. Zeus made the tactical error of causing an impenetrable cloud to descend over the area where he was attempting to hook up with the gorgeous Io. Unfortunately you have to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over on my Nana Hera… and in this case her mighty spouse’s mistake was even stupider because it was a ploy he’d tried on her before. Never a smart move with our dear Queen: she may have great beautiful soft dark cow eyes—”

“See, there we go with the bovine stuff again! It’s really starting to sound like a kink…”

“My Prince, I’m going to pretend I never heard you say that.” Inside those shadows, the God’s grin had to be stretching into something truly hilariously evil. “In any case, behind those big brown eyes lies a mind like a steel trap, and millennia of experience with the schemes of a serious contender for the title of World’s Most Philandering Deity. No matter: the rest of _that_ story you know—how Hera insisted Zeus give her this pretty little cow as a gift, how she then set Argus Hundred-Eyes to guard Io, and how Zeus sent Hermes to finagle Io’s freedom… which he did by killing Argus.”

“That being why we call him Argëiphontês. But I seem to remember that wasn’t the end of Io’s troubles.”

“No indeed. No sooner was Argus dead than Hera sent a stinging gadfly after Io, a nasty little immortal thing crammed full of her venomous spite. It hounded the poor heifer right across the continent, driving Io from place to place in dreadful pain. Finally even Hera got bored with this—or more likely just lost track of Io when the gadfly drove her down the shores of Asia Minor and across our pantheon’s southern borders into Egypt, down along the shore of the Nile. After that, with the tacit agreement of the local Gods, Zeus slipped across the frontier one night under cover of darkness and turned Io human again.” The God sighed, finished his tea, put the mug aside and steepled his fingers. “She was pregnant, by the way.”

Iaon shook his head, hiding his eyes for a moment. “This is _so_ peculiar.”

“And we haven’t even gotten into the exciting genealogy yet! So, the top of that chart, Iaon.” The God leaned forward in his chair to point at the spot. “In Egypt Io happily accepts refugee status, settles down and gives birth to Zeus’s son Epaphus. He grows up by the Nile, the local Gods not being overly troubled by having one more demigod around the place—especially one whose father’s the lord of the next pantheon over. Nor are they bothered when the local mortals make Epaphus their King. He marries a local demigoddess named Memphis, one of the daughters of the God of the Nile, and they have a demigoddess-daughter called Libya. When _she_ grows up she gets into a thing with Poseidon and later bears him a son named Belus, who inherits Egypt from Epaphus when he finally expires quite a while later. Belus in turn marries another daughter of the Nile God, a demigoddess called Anchinoë, and they have, well, a whole _passel_ of children, two of whom are sons named Danaus and Aegyptus.”

“All right,” Iaon said. “So… one of those is kind of a personification of Egypt…?”

“He becomes so, from the Hellenic point of view at any rate. And the other is his twin brother, who’ll become something similar for the Greek nation from the Asian point of view: you remember how the Trojans were always calling the Greeks 'Danaans' all through the War. In any case, the two of them become rivals for their father Belus’s throne practically as soon as they draw breath. And in both cases the title ‘father of the nation’ starts to become entirely too deserved, because the moment Danaus and Aegyptus become capable of sustaining erections, the two of them start a contest to see how many offspring they can produce.” The God’s voice went rich with distaste. “There is frankly _nowhere_ female and humanoid that the two of them seem to have been unwilling to, shall we say, dip their wicks. Nymphs of rivers and streams, dryads and oreads, local petty princesses, the occasional shepherd girl… At least they seem to have drawn the line at livestock.”

Iaon grimaced. “Small mercies.”

“Very small. Within an astonishingly short time, by various mothers scattered all over both shores of the Mediterranean—most of them semidivine—Aegyptus, over on the east side of the Nile where Belus has settled him, has fifty sons, and Danaus, over on the west side, has fifty daughters. And Danaus quite quickly begins to feel threatened.”

“Because fifty sons is a small army,” Iaon said. “Leaving aside the whole issue of who those boys’ mothers are, and what kind of political connections they imply. That’s an armed insurrection looking for a place to happen.”

“Exactly so. And on hearing that Aegyptus is about to demand the hands of Danaus’s fifty daughters for his fifty sons—using their marriages as an excuse to move into Danaus’s turf and take it for his own—Danaus decides not to wait until the whole crowd of Aegyptids turn up on his doorstep to remove him permanently, indeed terminally, from the equation. He decides to flee overseas with his daughters and seek refuge for them all from some friendly monarch or other ruler. And then the happy thought comes to him: his great-great-granddam Io was herself a refugee. Why not go to Argos, the land of her birth, and seek refuge there?”

Iaon frowned. “‘Happy?’” he said. “If one had a suspicious turn of mind, my God… one might take that as someone’s idea for a backdoor coup. Io wasn’t just some maiden in distress. She’d have been an heiress to the Argive throne, even though she couldn’t have occupied it as Queen-regnant herself. Her _descendants_ , though…”

He could feel the God smiling at him. “Yes. A thought that doubtless occurred more or less instantly to the Argives when Danaus and his fifty daughters, in company I’m sure with a small but significant military presence, turned up on their doorsteps. But no sooner had the good people of Argos started to get to grips with this development than a herald sent by Aegyptus and his fifty sons turned up in the throne room of the local King—Pelasgus, his name was—demanding that Danaus and his daughters be turned over to them.”

“On what grounds?”

“I imagine it had something to do with the number of Aegyptus’s war galleys that were then running up the river Inachos from the Gulf.” The God’s voice was grimly amused. “The Argives then proved, to my satisfaction at least, that they have some part in your ancestry, my Prince. For they did a very brave thing, indeed almost foolhardily brave. They voted to accept Danaus and his daughters as suppliants, and then refused to surrender them on demand.”

Iaon allowed himself a slight smile. “I doubt that helped very much, though.”

“There you would be right. Aegyptus somehow wrested Danaus around to his way of thinking. It’s possible that he threatened to massacre the Argives, thus saddling Danaus with the guilt of their deaths and condemning him to the retribution of the Furies because he didn’t comport himself in such a way as would spare his upright hosts being slaughtered. And the fifty Danaïds would then simply become the fifty Aegyptids’ slaves instead of their wives… little difference though there would have been in their actual lifestyle once Aegyptus’s sons took them home. As wives, they would at least have had what slight status would have accompanied honest wedlock.” The God clicked on the “k” in a scornful way that suggested a certain cynicism about the value of marriage in general. “Maybe the prospect of that small amount of saved face for his girls was what finally drove Danaus to agree. …Or who knows? Most human beings being what they are when their backs are up against the wall—meaning not what _you_ are, my Iaon—perhaps money simply changed hands and a deal was done.”

Iaon passed a hand over his eyes and shook his head.

“So the marriages were arranged, with precious little concern over who married who: some of the couples seemed to have been matched up simply on the grounds that their names sounded alike. Except, interestingly, that when one examines the civil records, it would seem that more mortals married mortals than immortals.” The God’s eyes glinted at Iaon over his steepled fingers. “And so the wedding day rolled ‘round, and the holy words were spoken and the bridal wine was drunk, and fifty brides were sung to their couches, where they laid them down by the sides of fifty waiting bridegrooms. And in the morning… only one bride and one bridegroom rose up to greet the dawn. Because in the dark of night, forty-nine brides had pulled forty-nine sharp daggers out from where they’d been hidden behind their maiden girdles, and stabbed their new husbands to death. Cut their heads off, too.”

The very thought of what the crime scene would have looked like made Iaon shudder. He was also heartily glad that, for whatever reason, the God hadn’t been there. Without someone to keep his excitement and sheer glee in check, things could have become truly awful.

The God stretched a bit in his chair and had a swallow of his tea. “Well. At the trial that followed, counsel for the defense claimed that Danaus commanded his daughters to kill the Aegyptids in the night because the marriage, being between cousins, was impious. And so, being good dutiful girls, they did just what they were told, because in law they had no choice. Counsel for the _prosecution_ , however, countercharged that what they were commanded to do was a greater impiety than that of filial disobedience: they _did_ have a choice to commit murder or not commit it, and should have refused the command, as did just one out of the fifty. That one—Hypermnestra, her name was, who spared Lynceus, the husband chosen for her—was also called to testify. She said that she’d spared him because _he_ _’d_ spared her maidenhead. Lynceus, though, said it was because he’d made proper love to her, and she’d fallen for him and thrown the knife away. Leaving aside motive, I daresay you’ll guess which of them the judges preferred to believe.”

“Yes,” Iaon said, annoyed, “I think I can guess.”

“‘True love,’” the God said, “‘conquers all.’” The absolute eyerolling scorn accompanying the sentiment was quite audible. “Including whatever the truth might have been. …But the trial had some other interesting irregularities associated with it. Would you believe that Danaus actually tried to get the non-husband-killing Hypermnestra convicted of disobeying him? For which the penalty would have been death.”

Iaon stared. _“What?_ If she was married, she wasn’t under his authority any more.“

“Ah, but was the marriage consummated? That was the issue on which Danaus’s case was predicated. He claimed that if Lyceus hadn’t had intercourse with Hypermnestra, the marriage was void. But then he claimed that it was void _regardless_ , because it was illegal. That being the reason the Argives had given them refuge in the first place.”

“Dear _God_ , what a mess,” Iaon murmured.

“It is, isn’t it,” the Consulting God said with some relish, tucking his legs up under him and his shadows on the chair. “Anyway! The Danaïds were acquitted of the murders in the civil trial… not that that was going to help them much in the long run, of course. Aegyptus, minus forty-nine of his sons, went back to Egypt to start plotting revenge against his brother. Danaus took out a contract on Lynceus, who went on the lam to Asia Minor until things should quiet down a little. And the forty-nine widowed Danaïds, whom understandably _no one_ really wanted to marry at this point, wound up being more or less awarded as prizes to the first forty-nine winners of a foot race that Danaus arranged. The contestants in the race didn’t even have to put up a dowry for any of them.”

“Their father seems to have been in kind of a hurry to get rid of them, after having been so concerned about protecting them,” Iaon said, scowling.

“Yes, that’s interesting, isn’t it.” The God’s eyes narrowed over his steepled hands. “They were disposed of at a discount like so many bales of damaged goods and shuffled off into minor households all over the Mediterranean. And as they gradually died of age or illness or ill-use, one by one those forty-nine women were sent to Hell to pay eternally for the crime of killing their first husbands on their wedding night. There in Tartarus they draw water forever and ever from Acheron the river of Lamentation, trying to fill a great vessel full enough of the waters of sorrow to immerse themselves and wash their sins away. But the vessel leaks, and so do the pitchers they try to fill it with, and so they will never be free… until someone can prove that what they did was not their fault.”

“And you,” Iaon said, “think you can.”

The God’s eyes narrowed. “There are crucial details about this case that require examination, Iaon—details that have nothing to do with the mere misconduct of the civil trial, in which the judges show signs of having been bought and sold only a shade less covertly than the Danaïds. _Motive_ is the issue here: discovering what those women really _meant to do_. And this question can only be resolved by going to Argos and sifting the ashes of forty-nine very cold funeral pyres… and then looking into some other matters.”

Iaon pushed his tea mug away. “Right,” he said, stood up, and headed for the doorway that gave on the stairs. “Armor?”

“Might be wise.”

“Gun?”

“Doubt you’ll need it,” the God said, rising too. “We are, after all, essentially visiting a graveyard.”

“And we’re looking for?”

He could feel the God scowling through his shadows. “Something that’s not there.”

The hair went up on the back of Iaon’s neck. _Gun,_ he thought, and went upstairs for it.

***

Though he and the God had been through there on cases once or twice in recent months, it had been some years since Iaon had last spent any significant time in the city of Argos—normally on his father’s business. Now as the God whirled the Shadowcloak from around them, he looked down from their vantage point on the Kriterion—the high stone terrace running in front of the building set into the Larissa hill above the city—and saw very little changed there. Roofs done in slate or here and there in dark blue-grey tile, whitewashed walls, little narrow streets, the city’s broad _agora_ and the road that ran down from it beside the Inachos to the Gulf, sparkling in the morning light between the shady spots where low clouds slipped across it on a chilly autumn morning’s breeze: everything perfectly unremarkable, indeed peaceful.

Except that now as he gazed down on it, Iaon saw overlaid on the city, everywhere, the shadow of the way the God viewed it—a place where crime crouched around every corner, where mortals endlessly plotted one another’s downfall, where murders lay hidden under layers of time or evil intent. _Is this the way everything_ _’s going to look to me, now, for the rest of my life?_ Iaon thought, with some dismay. _Shadows and dark hearts everywhere, and no landscape that_ _’s ever just sunny?_ He’d known at the time he started growing close to the God that it couldn’t _all_ be rainbows and flying horses: there would have to be downsides. Finding this to be true had been no shock. But the _down_ ness of some of the downsides was proving unexpected…

“Where to, Iaon?” said the impatient voice behind him.

Iaon sighed, then tilted his chin at one broad low building at the bottom of the _agora_. “The New Palace,” he said. “They tore down the old one after the Agamemnon business. Nobody was wild about living in a house where regicide had been committed. Might have given people ideas…”

“Understandable,” the God said. His keen eyes picked out a spot, a broad open circle in a wide flat roof: he pointed. “That smokehole there…?”

“Throne room, yeah. I’d guess they’ll be finishing up the morning’s business about now.”

The God slipped the Shadowcloak about the two of them again, and as things went dark around them, even in the warm morning Iaon found himself having to suppress an uncharacteristic shiver.

***

The present King of Argos, Temenos Aristomachëidês, was a small wiry middle-aged man with dark hair and dark eyes, wearing somber earth-colored robes and a pinched, uneasy look. He might have started out as a nervous man by nature… but it was impossible to tell for sure, as he now had numerous other reasons to be nervous. One was that his people had been among the first adherents of the newfangled _demokratos_ style of government that had begun springing up around the Peloponnese: the idea that the people living in a city-state should vote on what they thought was best for it, rather than let a single ruling family decide. Iaon, being a member of one of those families, wasn’t sure what he thought of the idea as yet. People taken in the singular and trained up into a specialized kind of job could be very smart—which was part of why kingship worked, it seemed to him—but people taken together in large groups could be astonishingly stupid. _Still_ _… jury’s out on this for the time being. Might take a few hundred years to see how it works out. No need to rush to judgment._

In any case, the state of King Temenos’s nerves was not improved by the appearance of a tall dark shape all shrouded with shadows in the middle of his throne room, suddenly by contrast making the sun pouring down through the skylight look a bit wan and strained. The officials attending him had left the room in great haste on the God’s and Iaon’s appearance, except for two armed guards who stood their ground—if as far from the God as they could get while still remaining on this side of the throne room’s doors. Iaon took up his normal parade-rest stance before the throne, hoping that might reassure them a little. _They_ _’ve earned their pay for today, poor sods…_

The Argive throne room was reminiscent of the one in Tiryns, though on a much smaller scale: the central hearth (its fire blazing up now after having been rekindled from the night’s smooring), walls painted with bright figures of birds and beasts and warriors of old, and an ornate tall chair positioned against the wall—this throne of beautifully carved wood with a painted relief on the seat-back, showing Zeus touching Io with his divine hand and turning her human again. The relief was visible because King Temenos had more or less launched himself out of his throne on the God’s appearance, and then had frozen halfway between it and the hearth as the God began stalking about, his eyes glinting with interest.

Iaon bowed just slightly to him, the courtesy of visiting royalty to one of similar rank. “Iaon Dasosarchëidês,” he said, knowing Temenos would immediately recognise the name of the scion of a fairly local royal family. Then he nodded sideways. “My colleague, the Consulting God.”

“Won’t take up more than a few moments of your time, noble King,” the God said, not even bothering to look at the man, simply strolling around the room as if examining the artwork. “We’re looking into a matter of historical interest.”

“Glad to help any way I can,” the King said in a somewhat strangled tone of voice.

“The Danaïd affair,” said the God, pausing before a particularly realistic rendering of a blue heron standing amidst a marsh’s reeds.

The sound of the King swallowing could be heard across the room. “What about it?”

“I’m interested in having a look at the place where the Aegyptids’ bodies were burnt,” said the God, strolling on. “The trial records simply say ‘outside the city walls’. Not exactly very precise, but I suppose we can’t realistically expect modern recordkeeping standards from people who were caught up in dealing with a difficult situation such a very long time ago….”

“About twenty stadia southwest of the city gates,” the King said after a moment. “There’s a field full of old worn-down mounds there, near some building-ruins by the shore. Supposedly that’s where it was done.”

Iaon picked up on the King’s initial hesitation and glanced at the God. But he’d simply gone drifting along toward the next wall-painting, a pair of lionesses ramping along through long grass. “Why on Earth would you want to be bothering with that old place?” said the King.

“On _Earth,_ _”_ the God said, and chuckled in dark amusement. “No, I wouldn’t say it has anything to do with anyone in residence _there_.” There was a brief silence during which Iaon watched King Temenos swallow again. “But you’ll have to forgive me… I couldn’t possibly comment further on an investigation in progress.” The God moved on to the next painting, right by the throne: an overarching grapevine with birds perched in it, and underneath a scattering of pitchers and amphorae, a vintager’s tools-of-the-trade. “If you’ve any questions, have a priest route your inquiries through the usual channels in Hermes Argeiphontês’ office.”

Iaon smiled very slightly at the misdirection, knowing that the Investigator (on hearing about the God’s interest in this case) had merely waved him off and told him, “Oh, go on, suit yourself…”

“Seems like something of a waste of time,” said the King.

The God turned slowly to look at him, and under that prolonged dark half-seen gaze the King seemed to shrink into himself a little. “So very kind of you to be concerned,” the God said. “Yet surely it’s my time to waste, if I care to, wouldn’t you say? For that’s one thing we immortals seem to have such a lot of. Nothing much to do with it but watch the antics of mortal men, and examine the occasional mildly interesting detail. All the little games mortals get up to, war and peace and life and death and other such minor amusements…”

Iaon felt the urge to shiver again: repressed it. _Am I coming down with something? Odd._ The King, though, shivered and didn’t bother hiding it.

The God was heading back toward Iaon now. “In any case,” he said, “let me just say that I’m sure _I_ don’t care who from more _recent_ years might have been systematically looting those burial mounds. There’s no city-state these days so secure in its investment portfolio that finances don’t occasionally become a problem. And we have more important business to attend to than publicizing just who a government caught a little short might have been _commissioning_ to do a little… shall we just call it ‘wealth reclamation?’ Since ‘graverobbing’ is such an _ugly_ word.” Iaon could feel the God smiling inside his shadows, and suspected that King Temenos could too, from the look on the man’s face. “Or I suppose one might simply consider it a novel implementation of the city-state’s laws covering treasure trove. Someone legally-minded might construe it as a touch impious, yes, but I’m sure other rulers in the region would turn a blind eye as long as nothing of _theirs_ was being considered for acquisition...”

The King’s eyes went from the God to Iaon and back again as he stood there unmoving, still and pale as an unpainted statue. “Yes, well, thank you for your assistance, very much appreciated, we’ll see ourselves out. Come along, Prince Iaon,” the God said, slipping the Shadowcloak off again, “we have things to… look into.”

Iaon glanced toward the King, nodded him a brisk farewell. “Majesty,” he said as the shadow fell about them and hid the throne room away.

The next moment the God had swept the Cloak off them again and was draping it back around him; it flared out and fluttered behind them in a gust of wind off the Gulf. They stood together on a narrow dirt road, not much more than a donkey track, that wound northeastward along the coastline that ran toward the mouth of the Inachos. The ground sloped in front of them to a breakwater of rough weed-greened boulders, these in turn slanting down to a shoreline strewn with fist-sized shingle.

Iaon turned and looked behind them, past the road. Hills reared up maybe twenty stadia westward, mostly dun-coloured and parched in the wake of summer, patched with the usual scrub of myrtle and wild sage and low-growing mulberry- and strawberry-tree. But much nearer than the hills, off to their right, was a long low tumble of ancient weed-choked stones—mossy, lichened blocks, all frost-shattered, with half a weathered greystone doorpost still by some miracle standing up down at one end of the ruin. And stretching away southward from it, to their left, the ground was humped and hummocked with a long double line of small grass-covered mounds, none of them taller than waist-height, most of them misshapen or flattened from being broken open at the tops or sides.

Iaon breathed out, letting the feel of the wind and the sun take a little of that unaccountable tension away from him, and turned back to the God. “So that last bit,” he said, “was _that_ really necessary? Poor twitchy little man. _He_ won’t have any appetite for his lunch now, that’s for sure.”

“Hmm? Oh,” the God said, and Iaon could feel his small smile—even see it faintly, while he was turned toward the shore, by the light reflected off the water and the pale shingle. “Twitchy? I shouldn’t wonder, especially when he pauses to consider his job prospects. And why not, when his people have got so used to driving the chariot rather than just making suggestions about which way it should go. The Temenids won’t last long here, if I’m reading the signs correctly.” The God gazed out across the glittering water in an abstracted sort of way. “Though elsewhere their children may come to something eventually, if random factors move in the right directions…”

He shrugged and turned, his gaze sweeping along the row of old burial mounds. “Come on, Iaon, this crime scene’s not going to search itself.”

***

The challenge, as had often enough been the case before, was figuring out where to start their work. It took the two of them an hour or so to thoroughly quarter the area and understand what they were actually looking at.

The ruined building was most quickly assessed. “It was a _xenona,_ _”_ the God said, having quickly examined the remnants of its foundations: “a public guesthouse.”

“Probably where they put up the funeral guests,” Iaon said. “Convenient, I suppose.” He looked down the road. “Wonder why the inn’s been abandoned, though? It’s in a good spot for travelers or traders, handy enough for the harbour.” Iaon glanced eastward. “Can’t be more than half an hour’s ride…”

The God shook his head. “Let it rest for the moment, Iaon,” he said. “The mounds first.”

“What are we looking for?”

“I’m not sure,” the God said. “It’s less likely to be something that shouldn’t be here than something that seems like it should and is missing…”

 _Well, that’s a big help,_ Iaon thought. He looked down the long lines of mounds and blew out a breath. “There won’t be anything of any value, anyway,” he said. “Everyone who’s been here before us will have seen to that.”

“Including King Temenos, if I’m any judge,” the God said. “Apparently not a man to neglect an opportunity on his own doorstep.”

Iaon shook his head, grimacing.

“Iaon,” the God said after a moment. “If dealing with these graves troubles you…”

“What?” Iaon thought about it a moment, then sighed. “No… not really. The people who died have had their due of fire: they’ve been done proper honour and their souls’ve got where they were going. If bringing their killers to proper justice means shifting a few bones…” He shrugged.

“We’ve got a lot to do, then. Best we get started.”

Before starting any work on the mounds, though, the God was intent on determining exactly where the pyres had been. Together they spent the next hour or so working all up and down the double line of mounds, kneeling again and again to pull up patches of the scraggly shoreline grass and then digging into the ground beneath them with sharp shards of slate from the inn’s long-fallen roof. All down the middle of the space between the two lines of tombs, wherever they dug, a handspan down or so there was always a dark line, a thin scorched layer of earth harder and more brittle than what lay above or below. “You’d have thought the rain or the sea-spray would have washed this all away by now,” Iaon muttered.

The God, down on his knees beside Iaon one more time, shook his head. “The Earth remembers much that men would prefer to forget,” he murmured, crumbling the darkened earth in one hand. “Which has been useful for us in the past…”

After careful examination of several more spots that interested him, the God chose one about halfway along between the two rows of mounds, and with Iaon’s assistance spent another hour or so digging a sequence of small pits around it. But these revealed nothing but occasional dark splotches of hardened earth, the only remnants of very old charcoal lumps. “No bone at all,” the God said, standing up from the last of these. “The pyres were burnt down flat, then the ashes sifted right to the ground when cold. Whatever remained was carefully gathered up, and then everything went into the tombs.”

“So no one was hurrying about it.”

“No,” the God said.

Iaon got a sudden image of a single black-robed man standing in the midst of all this, grim, silent, still; a ruthless plotter and aggressor, perhaps, but still a father, still someone who loved his sons. Planning vengeance for their deaths already, perhaps… but still grieving them. Iaon breathed out, trying to understand the weight of the pain that would come with having to officiate at the funeral rites of so many children, the anguish of putting the torch to pyre after pyre after pyre. “So many bodies,” was all he could find to say after a few moments.

 _“Decapitated_ bodies,” the God said, sounding a bit abstracted as he looked over the ground around them.

Iaon twitched. “You mentioned that. What did they do with the heads?”

“Threw them into the Lernaean marsh,” the God said, waving an arm vaguely southward.

 _Oh Gods,_ Iaon thought. The mutilation was so calculated a cruelty. It suggested that whoever was behind the the Aegyptids’ deaths wanted the souls of the departed to linger on the wrong side of the Last River for a good while, until the heads could be found— _if_ they could be found—and given to the fire in belated completion of the funeral rites. _It_ _’d be different if the celebrants didn’t know where the missing bits were; in that case burning the body parts that they had would be enough to send the souls on. But since they_ knew, _they had no choice: they had to go look for them. No rest for the dead until everything was recovered_ _…_ Iaon’s jaw clenched. _Whoever thought of that—that was ugly._

Yet for Iaon there was another way in which the thought of the headless bodies on those pyres made everything worse. _If you_ _’re a father and you’ve got fifty sons, it’s got to be too many to know them all by just body shapes or sizes or clothes. How’re you going to know them except by their faces? And to put the torch to a pyre and not even be sure which of your sons you were burning…_

Iaon shook himself. _All done with a long time ago now,_ he thought. _Best stay away from the emotional side of it. This is about sorting all this out for them, and for the Dana_ _ïds, once and for all._

He became aware, then, of the God watching him: and also of the _way_ the God was watching him—a shade concerned, a shade annoyed, a sense of something troubled edging it all. “You see now firsthand, my Prince,” said the God, “why when still working on their cases I waste no time mourning the murdered.”

Iaon nodded. The God turned away. Yet there was something a little odd about the speed with which he did it: a little more hastily than would be normal for something the God truly didn’t care about. The gibe was just slightly hollow. _Something to look into later,_ Iaon thought.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s get busy.” He briefly glanced across the Gulf, eyeing the clouds; as autumn came on, the coastal weather in these parts could shift suddenly without warning. “We’ve got good light and an early start: let’s not waste it. What are we looking for?”

"I _told_ you, Iaon, you know how I hate repeating myself…”

Definitely a touch edgier than it needed to be, that response. Iaon simply raised his eyebrows. “Humour me.”

The God emitted a sigh of heavily indulgent annoyance. “Something that probably shouldn’t be here. I’ll know it when I see it.”

Iaon looked down the double row of mounds… forty-nine of them. “I really hope so…”

***

 

All through the early afternoon, and the midafternoon, and well into the late afternoon, they dug.

The mounds were all built along the same design: a rough circle or oval of stones—nothing hewn, just fieldstones such as might be pulled out of any stretch of ploughland that was being cleared—each one with the burnt bones of a body placed in the center of it, arranged as if the body had been lying on its side, curled up knees-to-chest. Near the skeleton, within reach, were usually some shards of ancient crockery, a little wine-jar or plate or drinking cup—the remnants of something for the soul of the dead one to have or use down in the Shades, a memento from the land of the living. Once these were in place the graves had been roofed over with piled stones, and over the years the coarse strawlike salt grass of the shore had crept up around each mound and knotted the stones together, reseeding itself on top and dying away underneath, year after year, the ever-thickening coverlet of golden-green further rounding and softening the mounds into the desolate landscape.

So nature had embraced and gentled the last resting places of these dead; but men had been less kind. It took Iaon and the God at least a couple of hours before they came to any burial mound that had _not_ been broken into, disassembled and despoiled at one point or another. The few tiny pieces of jewelry they turned up—ornamented pins, cloak brooches, very rarely a ring or earring—were still there only because they had been missed by past years’ thieves (or by what the God referred to in utterly deadpan irony as “reclamation subcontractors” acting on behalf of the Argive royal house). As Iaon had predicted, only things the graverobbers reckoned worthless had been left. But these were things that to the God, in his investigation, were beyond price.

The God’s method with the graves was surprisingly gentle, even sympathetic, but ruthlessly systematic. He would touch nothing without first gazing long into a given gravesite and committing everything visible to that unerring memory. “Recreation…” he said to Iaon at one point, his hands moving in air as inside his Palace of Memory he built the site he was about to partially unbuild. Once this task was done, misplaced boulders and roofstones were lifted away, loose dirt inside the broken mounds was brushed away with the hands; bones were carefully lifted, examined, and put aside, but always perfectly replaced exactly where they had been found. On some of the mounds the God spared very little time at all: over one or two of them he spent nearly an hour each.

It was for Iaon, at the beginning at least, a fairly boring business. In the midst of work on the grave where the God spent an hour sifting dirt and hardly speaking, Iaon’s mind drifted back to their chat that morning—to the image of the tablet the God had handed him, all covered with names and interconnecting lines, and something that had then started niggling at him but that he hadn’t had time to run to ground. “My God,” he said, “do I remember rightly that you said something about most of the more mortal Danaïds winding up married to the more mortal Aegyptids? And the demigoddesses mostly getting married off to the demigods?”

The God’s gaze came up to meet Iaon’s through his shadows for a moment. “Not in quite those words,” he said, “but yes, so I said.”

Iaon nodded, pausing a moment to gaze down at the earth he was brushing aside from what remained of someone’s ribcage. “If I’m recalling correctly, some of those girls were related other ways than just being sisters, or half-sisters anyway. Especially the nymphs. They had major Gods, Olympians, a generation or two back in their family trees. Poseidon, Apollo, even Zeus. And so did some of Aegyptus’s sons.”

“That’s right.”

Iaon spotted something between two ribs, reached down to tease it free of the dirt: a triangular fragment of some pale pottery, lighter than the redware that was most of what they’d been finding. He turned it over in his hands, slowly rubbing the dirt away with his thumbs. “When a demigod marries a demigoddess,” he said, “can the divine blood in the child, or one of their children anyway, come out _stronger_ than it was in the parents? So that you wind up with, not a demigod, but a three-quarter-god or something? If there’s even a word for that.”

The God was once again concentrating on the dirt he was sifting though his hands; he just nodded. “Go on.”

Iaon knew from the way the God was trying to sound casual that he was onto something. “And if in the next generation that child’s parents marry him or her to someone else with a lot of divine heredity, or with a close blood tie to an Olympian, then the bloodline keeps strengthening until—” His eyes widened. “This is a different version of what was going on with Semiramis, isn’t it. But a lot bigger, a lot more complicated—”

The God dusted his hands off, looked up at Iaon, and through his shadows his eyes could be seen gleaming with pure pleasure. “O my clever Iaon,” he said in utter satisfaction. “You observe, you _follow_. The geopolitics of the situation would’ve acted as a useful distraction to most men of that time: a seeming disagreement between two feuding princes over the throne of a faraway land. But the real causes run far deeper. You’ve reasoned your way through to the heart of the _real_ game Danaus and Aegyptus were playing. A deadly dangerous one… but with a priceless payoff.”

“They were trying to use each other’s children to breed new Gods,” Iaon said. “And fighting each other over who was going to control them.”

The God’s obscurely-glimpsed grin had a feral edge to it. “My Prince, whoever was responsible for your classical education is to be commended.”

Iaon snorted. “You can thank my father, then. But it’s the cattle-breeding side of my education that did the trick. I know something about how to strengthen a desirable trait or get rid of a weak one over a few generations—”

“And what could be more desirable in some people’s eyes, my Iaon, than immortality for their children and further descendants? Or at the very least, _extremely_ long life, coupled with near-lifelong beauty and physical health—the robustness of youth, made near-endless. But you’ve seen that there’s more.”

Iaon rubbed his forehead and sighed. “It’s always about power, isn’t it.”

“As usual, with men or Gods. The higher the percentage of divine blood that can be concentrated in each generation, the more powerful, more beautiful and longer-lived your descendants become. So you intermarry your children and grandchildren with demigods—the more divine ancestry those have, the better. Continue the breeding program long enough, make the right choices, and with a modicum of luck on your side you eventually become the ancestor of full-blood Gods. And again if you’re lucky—and have controlled your descendants’ desires correctly—those new Gods, in the fullness of their power, reach back through time and a worldspace made malleable by their intent, pluck _you_ their ancestor from whatever afterlife to which your mortality has previously consigned you, and make _you_ a God as well.”

Iaon shook his head. “A huge gamble.”

“But with nothing to lose for those who’re desperate to live forever,” said the God. “It’s one of the longest of long games… and played with utter ruthlessness by those who’re most committed to the win. Even the lesser prizes can have value in the short term—such as the merely political power that’s likely to accompany being closely affiliated with one deity or another.”

“Yes,” Iaon said, “I got a sense of that in Babylon.”

“But for mortals even that prize is worthless against the great one. _This_ case is unusual in that no men before had ever had direct control of so many children in a single generation with so much divine blood in them. The odds of producing true Gods within just a few generations would have been unusually high… assuming the men supervising the breeding program didn’t first attract the attention of one or another of the local heads-of-pantheon. There’s plenty of room in Tartarus for those suspected of plotting against the rulership of Heaven. But as it happens…” The God reached out, picked up one of the fire-blackened rib bones lying on the ground between them and held it thoughtfully in his lap. “Danaus and Aegyptus played the game, through their unfortunate children, and both lost.”

“And that’s why Danaus dumped his daughters onto the second-hand marriage market so soon after the Aegyptids were gone,” Iaon said, “isn’t it. All his plans were ruined. There was no chance of marrying them off to other demigods, afterwards. No chance of picking up where he left off, because of the notoriety of the murders.”

“Yes.” The God turned the burnt rib over a couple of times in his hands, then placed it gently on the ground again. “Aegyptus died some while after his sons did: of a broken heart, the story goes. But I rather suspect he was murdered.”

Iaon’s eyebrows went up at that. “Does Danaus strike you as the compassionate type, Iaon? Considering what he did to his own flesh and blood as soon as they were no longer of any use? Imagine what his attitude would be toward someone who’d actually _annoyed_ him. ...And that nervous little king up the hill?” The God nodded in the direction of Mount Larissa. “After getting rid of the Aegyptids through his daughters, and forcing Aegyptus to flee, Danaus wound up displacing poor King Pelasgus, who died suddenly. A knife in the back, poison in the cup… who knows? Either way, the voters of Argos were hastily convinced to see sense and accept him as their new king. Rather later, when things had been quiet for a good while and Danaus felt secure, the last son of Aegyptus slipped into the palace one night and put a knife into _him_. Lynceus, the surviving son, and his wife, that last Danaïd, Hypermnestra, ruled here for quite a while… then vanished away without explanation when people started passing comments on how young and strong they seemed for people who’d been on the throne so very, _very_ long.”

Iaon thought briefly of Semiramis, the beauty and youthful power of her after forty long years of rule, and simply nodded. “King Temenos up the hill,” the God said, “is one of their descendants. So there, my Iaon, you have yet another reason for him to be a bit twitchy about sudden appearances and disappearances from his palace.”

Iaon sighed, nodded again. The God was gazing down at the bones, seemingly on the way to being lost in thought. “Are we done?” Iaon said after a moment.

“What? Oh. With this one, yes.” The God leapt up. “Come on, let’s see what the next has to offer…”

And so it went: more shifting rocks until one’s back ached, more sifting through dirt until one’s hands were sore. Through the long day of work, as the two of them alternated between heavy physical labour and delicate small-scale search and examination of the mounds, Iaon’s mood shifted repeatedly. He slid from vague unease—because no matter what he’d said to the God, these were _graves_ and graves really ought to be left alone—to rekindled sorrow, as they handled blackened bones and calcined bones and heat-shattered ones, and here and there came across a grave where there was no skull, the head having never been found—to sudden unpredictable accesses of dark amusement (as when they found a mound that had _three_ skulls in it, and wondered whether they should try redistributing the extra ones), tinged with triumph twice when the God was able to deduce to which other skull-less skeleton they belonged, and with sadness once when he could not. Then there was recurrent annoyance at how callously the remains had been disturbed and the grave-goods plundered, and finally simple weary resignation (as the shadows started to lengthen and the sun slipped behind the western hills) at how much longer this bloody job was still going to take. And when maybe an hour before sunset and around the thirtieth mound or so Iaon started finding things not even darkly comedic but just plain funny, he tried to resist that, and finally gave up. _It_ _’s the only emotion I_ haven’t _had today,_ he thought, feeling resigned in an entirely different way. _Probably overdue._

This happened most notably when, as they worked one of the mounds with a headless skeleton, the phrase _Lernaean marsh_ tweaked something in Iaon’s memory. “Wait,” he said after a moment. “’Lernaean’ as in where the Hydra came from?”

“The very same,” the God said. “Twenty stadia or so that way.” He waved an arm at one of the mound’s inner walls, unerringly southward even though their view of the world outside was blocked.

“Any connection, you think?”

“How do you mean?”

“All those heads. And then a monster… with all those heads…” Iaon chuckled.

The God paused in brushing some dirt aside, looked thoughtful. “Unlikely,” he said. “The Hydra was another of the children of the Titans Typhon and Echidna.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Iaon said, “the Mother and Father of ASBOs.”

This time the God laughed a little too. “Yes. So I’d say what you’re positing is merely a thematic coincidence.” The God lifted a long fire-darkened leg bone, setting it carefully aside and starting to run his fingers through the crumbly dirt beneath it. “But in any case, the Hydra’s extra heads were of a rather conditional nature. You didn’t get more until you started chopping them off. I believe it had just one, originally.”

“Oh well.”

The God sat back on his heels. “But now that you mention it, the maths of the situation do seem a touch suspect.”

“What? How so?”

“You cut off one head, two grow in its place.”

Iaon wrinkled his brow, brushing dirt aside and coming up with a broken bit of redware pottery, part of a cup, probably. “So we should be seeing multiples of two, you’re saying.”

“Exactly. Yet the thing keeps being reported as having _nine_ heads in most stories I’ve heard.”

“Well, maybe it works out if you keep the other eight separate. Because wasn’t the ninth one immortal? Herakles wound up having to bury it under a rock or something.”

“So one story says. But why didn’t he get two immortal heads as a result of chopping _that_ one off? It’s all most illogical, Iaon.”

“Oh, right, the way a giant dragon-snake-thing with poisonous blood and only its _head_ immortal is all that logical to start with.”

“I don’t make these things up, my Prince, I just wind up having to deal with the results.”

Iaon snickered again (suddenly beset by a mental image of the God crankily lecturing a recalcitrant Hydra for being mathematically uncooperative), and then felt guilty for snickering, and then—seeing the God suddenly holding still and watching him intently, a shadow among growing shadows—just sighed and laughed. “Graveyard humour,” he said. “What can you do?”

The God shook his head. “Let me see what you’ve got there. Any pattern left on it?”

“Getting hard to tell in this light…”

The God took the little potsherd, peered at it. Iaon dusted his hands off, rubbed his eyes with the backs of them, sighed. “My back is really not thanking me for this,” he said, standing and stretching. “Yours can’t be any better.”

“Mmm,” the God said, oblivious.

 _Willow-bark for both of us when we get home,_ Iaon thought, _whenever that is._ “Give me a moment to work the kinks out,” he said, and climbed out of the mound.

The wind had changed, the late offshore breeze now blowing out past Iaon toward the water. He bent forward to touch his toes a couple of times, feeling his back-sinews slowly stretch and crack: then straightened up and walked into the long barren “street” between the mounds, facing into the wind and listening to it hissing in the grasses. Except for that sound everything was silent from here to the distant hills; even the seabirds gone quiet.

Slowly Iaon walked past the second, westward row of mounds, looked up and down it sadly. So desolate a place, this time of day, shrouded in the unavoidable shadows of mortality. _And these were demigods mostly,_ Iaon thought. _Not that it did them much good at the end of the day. Not enough divine blood in them to make any real difference when people started sticking knives in them..._ He let out a breath. _Mortals or half-mortals, we_ _’re all in the same boat together: or will be, sooner or later. Crossing that last River, or waiting to…_

It wasn’t the kind of thought Iaon normally dwelt on… but when you’d spent all day in a graveyard, such thoughts were harder to ignore than usual. _Because however good or bad it is, what we two have, I still am what I am, and it can_ _’t last forever. And what will it be like for him when I’m gone?_

Iaon briefly tried to imagine it—then forcibly stopped himself, as he’d forced himself to stop dwelling on the emotional side of what the burials here had been like. In the end, all he could do was hope that the God would quickly get over him. Some gods, if the stories were to be believed, had reacted unusually badly to the loss of mortal lovers, were (in some cases) near-inconsolable. _And what do they do about that in Heaven? Does Aesculapius have some divine-strength version of that stuff Helen sneaked into the wine, that time Odysseus_ _’s son came calling and everyone got so sad about ‘absent friends’? God, you’d really hope so. Eternity would be a long, long time to grieve…_

Iaon let out a long sigh; this wasn’t really today’s problem. _We_ _’ve got other business. Might as well get back to it…_ With hands kneading at the small of his back Iaon stretched again, turning a little, gazing past the second line of mounds toward the low soft dusk-purpled hills to the west.

As he did his eye fell on the grassy ground past the mounds. _Funny how there_ _’s not as much scrub here as there is further inland. Guess it doesn’t like the salt…_ And then he realized that in the spot where his gaze was resting, there was something off about the color of the grass. And the ground swelled up just a little there. _Not a mound, but_ _… what?_

Iaon headed over to it, walked around the spot, then knelt by one side of it and started pulling some of the grass up. After a few moments of crumbling up the soft friable dirt beneath the matted grass, and pushing it aside, Iaon could see that the ground in this spot lacked the burnt layer that underlay where the pyres had burned, as well as many of the mounds.

Not far away, sticking up out of the ground nearly edge-on and half hidden in the grass, was another of the shards of slate from the old inn’s roof, this one perhaps the size of Iaon’s palm. Iaon worked it free and then used it to scrape a little deeper into the spot he was interested in, pushing aside more of the crumbly earth.

Then something stopped him. A tangle of old thin roots, with something slender and green sticking out of it. A piece of metal, narrow, flattened, oblong, the length of a finger. _Too thin to be an arrowhead,_ Iaon thought. Curious, he scraped around the ball of roots, tugged. It came free.

Iaon sat back on his heels and worked at the old tough fibers for a moment with the sharp edge of the slate; but it wasn’t really much good at slicing. He dropped it, reached to his belt and unsheathed his sword. The roots parted quickly as he sawed gently at them with the blade’s edge. Iaon put his sword away again, started prying the roots apart.

What finally lay revealed in his hand was a beautifully stylized little figure of a horse, long-legged and arched of neck, greened with old corrosion. Iaon scratched gently at the surface of it with one thumbnail. The old perished metal on the outside flaked away, crumbling, but finally under his nail Iaon caught sight of a tiny wink of clean metal, a speck of bright bronze.

He swallowed hard, realizing what he was holding. _Not a votive object. Not a grave gift. A_ toy.

“Oh dear Heaven,” Iaon said softly. _“My God—!”_

A second later the God was out of the mound where they’d been working, hurrying toward him in a flurry of shadow. “Iaon?”

For a moment all Iaon could do was shake his head, his throat gone briefly tight, as the God folded down to his knees beside him, looking in confusion at what he held. “Iaon, what is it?”

Iaon swallowed again. “This isn’t just where the funerals happened, my God. This is where the _weddings_ happened.”

The God’s head came up sharply. _“What?”_

“Look,” Iaon said. “There are more.”

He started digging more deeply, knowing what he’d find, and feeling faintly sick at heart. Only things of metal or bone would have survived so long in the ground: anything made of fabric or wood would be long since perished. _But they_ _’ll be here. Not just one toy, one keepsake. Many more…_

“The first part of the wedding, _the proteleia,”_   Iaon said as he pulled a lump of dirt and root-tangled stuff up out of the ground. “It happened here.”

The God looked down at him from his shadows, his mind plainly already racing. “When a bride bids farewell to the things of childhood…”

Iaon nodded, sadly pulling the grass-roots away from the things he’d found, rubbing the dirt away as he laid them out one by one. The little metal horse, first, green with corrosion. Then a carved bone comb, scratched with a design of trailing flowers. Then a small narrow ivory bracelet, brown-stained by the earth it lay in, the roots themselves making a graceful pale tracery around it where they’d kept the brown earth away.

The God knelt down by him, reaching out a shadow-gloved hand to the little horse, taking it up and weighing it in his hand. “Outside my City,” Iaon said, “we had a place for brides-to-be to do this. Their farewell sacrifice to Artemis the Protector of the Young. Just a plain stone, out in the fields beyond the walls…“

He could see it in his mind, set in the ground in a spot far enough from the walls that a little sheltering low scrub could be allowed to grow. Normally this offering, something cherished from the girl’s childhood, was simply left on the altar stone for the Gods and their servants the Elements to take to themselves. But Iaon had seen thoughtless parents, or cruel ones, force their daughters to destroy the offering—set fire to the sacrificed toy or doll, tear it to pieces. Later he’d often enough seen some middle-aged woman, out for a walk outside the walls on a bright sunny day, lingering around that site, looking sorrowfully at the ground. Iaon had asked his mother about it one day, and the Queen’s eyes had gone suddenly misty as she’d told him about a particular doll she’d given to the Goddess and missed ever since…

He sighed and shook his head as his hands, more or less operating on their own, kept separating out the objects from the roots and crumbling dirt and setting them out for the God to see. A bronze circle-brooch and its pin, child-sized. Another bone carving, this time of a little shortlegged dog—the kind bred to drive cattle by nipping at their heels—its ears pricked up, its jaws open to bark…

“Can you think of any other reason for all these to be here together?” Iaon said.

The God shook his head. “None, my Prince. Once more, you’ve conducted the light where it needs to be.”

He stood up and held a hand down to Iaon. The Prince took it, pulled himself up. “This changes _everything_ , Iaon,” the God said, glancing all around him. “We need to look at the grave goods with a different eye. It hadn’t occurred to me to expect wedding items among them—”

Iaon was surprised. “No?”

“It’s always _something,_ _”_ the God hissed. “How often do mortals do anything so _sensible?”_ He sounded profoundly annoyed.

Iaon gave him a dry look. “Thanks so much for the vote of confidence.”

“Oh, stop it, Iaon, I don’t mean _you_ , you’re almost always the exception—”

“Excuse me, _almost?_ _”_

But the God was paying him no mind: he was already heading for the nearest of the broken-open burial mounds. “If suddenly you’ve got forty-nine dead bodies the morning after a wedding celebration, it makes perfect sense to dispose of the bodies somewhere relatively close by. I just hadn’t expected them to actually have _done_ it.”

Iaon went after the God, glancing over his shoulder at the cracked and tumbled stones of the inn’s foundations. “It’s no wonder they abandoned the place, though. Who’d ever want to stay in a place where something like _that_ wedding had happened?”

“As with the Old Palace,” the God said. Yet Iaon could feel him frowning. “But this raises another question, Iaon. Nearly everybody involved in this wedding was of royal blood. By rights it should have been held in the palace. Why hold it in a common inn?”

“Politics,” Iaon said. “If the data you gave me was accurate—”

_“‘If?’”_

Iaon smiled a small getting-my-own-back smile, but it was grim. “Then holding it offsite was a way to keep from antagonizing the participants. Holding the wedding in the palace could have been seen as legitimizing the claims of one side or the other.”

The God sniffed. “They’d already done a fair job of that by accepting the Danaïds as suppliants.”

“Maybe so. But Zeus himself protects both suppliants and those who offer them refuge, so the Aegyptids would’ve been crazy to attack them on _those_ grounds. The marriage itself, though… seems like the Argives felt that to be dicey even though Danaus had suddenly agreed to it. Insisting it be held outside the city walls would’ve been a message, in its way. ‘We may have accepted you as suppliants, but we really don’t approve of your change of heart. Do this if you must, but leave us out of it.’”

“You could very well be right,” the God said.

“A decent _proaulia_ takes a day just for _one_ family’s daughter,” Iaon said, and shook his head. “But _fifty?_ _”_ The thought of the logistics of that first day alone, the farewell of the brides to their birth-families, was enough to curl your hair. “Gods, with this crowd you’d need an whole _agora_ to hold it in…”

“Possibly a small convention centre would not have gone amiss,” the God muttered. “Be still now, Iaon, I need to _think—_ _”_ And the God turned slowly right around and then closed his eyes, steepled his fingers under his chin and went still.

Iaon filed the “convention centre” statement away under the constantly growing _Ask Him What That Means One Of These Days_ category, and turned away from the God to look around, as he’d suggested, with new eyes. After the _proaulia_ , the next day, would have come the _gamos_ proper. _The runup to the wedding feast would be bad enough,_ Iaon thought, already falling into that familiar planning-it-out mode to which anyone who managed a large household was susceptible. _The nuptial bath for the brides, no inn would have a bath room big enough to do fifty of them, they_ _’d have had to do it in the sea. Well, at least_ that’s _right here. Then the good-luck offerings to the Gods_ _…_ He could just see in his head the absolute parade of brides and grooms up to the temples in Argos city, not to mention the mort of caged offering-doves and sacrificial lambs and whatnot that they’d have had to cart up there along with them.

 _A procession of livestock to market,_ some part of his mind remarked sourly. Because that would have been what this was: a wholesale sacrifice of these young women on the altar of expediency, their forced marriages to the Aegyptids simply a way (on the surface) to prevent civil war in Egypt and a massacre of the people here who’d tried to protect them. No amount of dancing and flute-playing, up the hill and back down again, would have been able to disguise _that_. Iaon could just imagine the forced expressions of of the people in the high town, on their doorsteps, the tight fake smiles and manufactured cheers as they watched the procession come and go. _Fine, get it over with, get the hell married and go back wherever you came from, you_ _’re nothing to do with_ us _no matter_ who _you say your however-many-greats-grandma was._

…And then back down to the inn again. The wedding dinner, but first the ceremonial pre-dinner washing, the _loutra._ Iaon winced at the very thought. _Can_ _’t do_ that _with sea water; someone_ _’s going to have to go to the nearest spring and cart back water enough to pour over the heads of a hundred people._ The inn’s fetch-and-carry staff were going to have something to say about _that. Overtime for everybody_ _… And then, of course, the feast._ Iaon could just hear his mother muttering darkly over what dinner for a hundred people would turn into in terms of slaughtered bullocks and sheep, and firewood to roast them, and servants to wait on the diners, and plates and cups and what kinds of wine and how much… Even for an inn used to big parties of travellers it would be a lot to deal with. “Gods,” Iaon murmured, “fifty couples getting married, they’d never have enough plates and cups and things, they’d have had to buy in a whole joblot of pottery from somewhere, what a nuisance...”

From behind him a sudden dark voice spoke. _“…Say that again.”_

“Oh my God I’m so sorry,” Iaon said, “I forgot—”

“Iaon. Shut up and _say that again._ _”_

The urge to say “Kind of hard to do both…!” was strong, but Iaon suppressed it. “I said, if you have fifty couples getting married at once, no inn keeps that many table settings around. They probably would’ve had to buy some local potter’s whole inventory.”

Next thing he knew Iaon had been seized by the shoulders and whirled around, and the God had pulled him close and was kissing him, fast and hard and delighted, mouth, cheeks, forehead, mouth again. “You are _beyond_ brilliant today, Iaon, light is running through you like a bloody _river_ , Phlegethon has _nothing_ on you, you are on _fire!_ The _pottery_ , there were numerous pattern matches, _too many_ matches, and if they were funerary pottery it didn’t matter but if they’re _wedding_ pottery, if, _if—_ _”_

He pushed Iaon away, froze, closed his eyes and lifted his hands. “Got to test it, can’t take this for granted, have to be absolutely certain!” The God’s hands started moving in the air before him as he sorted through the images of the graves that he’d stored in his Palace of Memory.

Suddenly they were both surrounded in a whirl of bright imagery that started stitching itself into the darkening air. Iaon was seeing what the God saw in his mind—fragments and shards of redware, not the fancy high-end painted stuff with black figures, but a simpler pottery, a paler ware with simple repeating designs scraped into it. And yes, there was one pattern that kept turning up, red and white-striped triangles that zigzagged around the bodies of widemouthed cups. Iaon saw one of them assemble itself in the air in front of him out of bits and pieces that the God had seen in one mound.

“We need these,” the God said. “The real pieces. Every one you can find.” He broke off, his hands moving more quickly every moment. “The third mound, fourth, sixth, tenth, eleventh, all of those had this pattern of pottery. And there are more after those. Help me get all the pieces, Iaon, search carefully, we must have all of them that remain, any one of them could make the difference _—_!”

The God’s urgency was infectious. Together and separately they dodged from mound to mound, the God shouting directions at Iaon, Iaon digging, finding, digging again, coming back with handfuls of the things and going out for more. It took half an hour or so, and the Moon was sliding up into the sky over the Argolic Gulf, before they dropped together to their knees over the final results of their search—enough pieces to cover a war-shield’s worth of ground.

The God started sorting through the shards, tossing aside the lighter ones, making a smaller pile of those that were darker on what would have been the insides of the vessels. “The staining,” the God said. “Look at it, Iaon, even after all these years. Thank the Fates for cheap disposable pottery, if this stuff were good enough quality to be glazed inside we'd have nothing to work with. Help me sort out the winestained ones, quickly—”

Iaon sorted. “Getting kind of hard to tell the difference, my God. This light isn’t much to work with.”

“Here,” the God said, and did something that in all their time together Iaon had seen him do only rarely: strip the gloving shadow away from one hand, pinch thumb and forefinger together and create that spark of hard sharp light he’d first made when he and the Prince had been in that darkened stable and Iaon had been examining Pegasus’s flank.

“Better,” Iaon said. It took him only a few minutes to separate out the winestained fragments from the ones with no trace of that old purple-brown.

The God put his light out, then reached down to the most-stained of the pieces, lifted it to his face, into his shadow, put his tongue to it and tasted it.

A long silence. Iaon watched, tense.

“Hard to tell,” the God murmured. “Another.”

Iaon handed him another of the stained shards.

Another silence.

“So _old,_ _”_ the God said. “So very faint…”

A long pause. “But not too faint for _me!_ ” And sudden fierce satisfaction flared up in his voice. “Just _barely_ there, even after all these years, but barely is enough. _Another—”_

Iaon handed him another potsherd. The God sniffed this one, licked it, actually put it in his mouth and sucked it: then set it aside. “...Yes. Another. That one!” He pointed.

Iaon handed him the shard he wanted.

The God licked this one too. “Yes. _Yes!_ _”_

“Yes what?”

“No question,” the God said, dropping the shard. “The wine. It was high quality wine, Iaon. Chian. _Not_ funeral wine. That tends to be thin, nobody wants to drink so much of it that they actually get drunk and disgrace themselves when people are grieving. It’s always lower quality, a local wine, _never_ an import. Wedding wine has to be worth something, otherwise it’s a sign of one side of the family insulting the other. Wars have started over such things in the past, and these would have been the most _hypersensitive_ inlaws-to-be you can possibly imagine, each side looking for any sign that the other was slighting it. This was _wedding wine!_ _”_ And he clapped his hands in absolute delight.

Iaon picked up the dropped shard, licked it. He couldn’t taste anything but dirt and time and cheap baked clay. “You got that it was _Chian_ from _this?_ _”_

The God shrugged. “South side of the island,” he said. “Not sure of the vineyard. Somewhere around Pirgi, possibly.”

Iaon couldn’t do anything but grin up into the God’s face, shaking his head. “You are _amazing!_ _”_

He could feel the answering smile of delight on his skin, like sunlight.

“But here, Iaon,” the God said, picking up the biggest of the winestained shards, three or four of them together. “Look at the size of these. These are the prize. They’re not from a cup. These were from the pouring jug, the _oinichoe_.”

The God lifted the most-stained of the pieces to his lips, tasted it as he’d tasted the cups.

“The same,” he said after a moment. “Same wine. _Yes!_ _”_

He leapt to his feet again. “There has to be another.”

Iaon got up too, shaking his head. Not because the God wasn’t right: of course he was. At weddings men and women sat separately, and were served their food and wine separately by two separate groups of servants, from vessels rigorously kept apart for religious reasons. But Iaon remembered the mound where they’d found these pieces, and it was the only one where they’d found anything so large, at least intact. “We didn’t find any other pieces this big, my God.”

The God closed his eyes again, held his hands up. Once again bright shard-shapes filled the air around them, grouped together this time, and the God knocked them out of visibility one after another: but there were no matches to the big _oinochoe_ pieces.

“Nothing,” Iaon said, disappointed.

The God breathed out. “You’re right. Not a trace.”

But to Iaon’s astonishment, he saw as the God dropped his hands that he wasn’t angry, or upset. He was triumphant, as if something he’d been hoping for had been proven true. “The other _oinochoe,_ the other jug. _Someone took it away with them,_ Iaon. It’s the key to this. The key to everything!”

Iaon stood up and dusted himself off, leaned back with his hands on his hips and tried to stretch his back muscles into something like their proper position. “All right. Someone took it. Why?”

“Because something about it was different. Something they didn’t dare take the chance might be found out.”

Iaon wasn’t sure where this was going. “All right. Took it where?”

“Obvious, Iaon. _Egypt._ _”_

The Prince rubbed his forehead, because the leap was a little too far for him right now, no matter how obvious it seemed to the God. “Not right now, please God tell me you’re _not_ considering haring straight off there, because I really, really—”

“Need some rest?” the God said. “Of course you do.” Then he glanced down at himself and grimaced. Iaon hadn’t thought it was possible for those shadows of his to get dirty or dusty, but apparently it was. The Shadowcloak’s one red eye, looking pained, was squinted closed against the dry pale dust powdered down it. “And I suppose I could use a bath.”

“And a sleep.”

The God’s eyes rolled. “Well. If you insist.”

“I bloody well _do_ , you great dirty earth-grubbing God you. After a good soak, because divine or not you have to be aching all over. And _food!_ You’ve had nothing all day.”

“Come to think of it, neither have you.”

“Not the point.”

“Yes it is.”

Iaon snickered. “All right. Yes it is.” He sighed, rubbed his face. “I’m knackered. And hungry. And, gods, _thirsty_ , after all this day out in the sun and the wind.” He’d been so distracted all day, he hadn’t even noticed until now how parched he was.

“Oh, _not_ because of all this talk of wine?”

“We’ll get to the wine, I’m sure.” Iaon sighed, dropped his hands. “But, my God…”

He turned to look at the mounds, shook his head. “I’m not seeing it. Who took the other _oinichoe?_ _”_

The God stood silent in his shadows for a moment, gazing eastward toward the rising gibbous Moon. “Who do you think, Iaon?” he said. “The last of the bridal party still standing. The ones who had some reason for it not to be found. And who still do.”

Iaon stared at him. Gradually he had been getting used to the way that time, in the House they shared, could sometimes without warning become a more elastic thing than mortals normally expected it to be—past and present casually bumping into each other all the time, the future sometimes staggering through the sitting room without warning. But the walls of the House were not around them now. This was something very different.

He swallowed. “You’re saying,” Iaon said, “that the last Danaïd, the one of the fifty who didn’t kill her husband, the one who vanished… _is still alive._ _”_

“She and her husband both, my Iaon. And with them, in Egypt, lies our only chance of proving that the murders were not the forty-nine’s fault…”

The God did not say “…But _theirs._ _”_   He wouldn’t say it, Iaon knew. It wasn’t the God’s way to give voice to his suspicions without first having collected his evidence. But Iaon by now knew the sound of those suspicions even without hearing them spoken.

Iaon breathed out. “You really were not joking about how cold this case was,” he said.

“Indeed not. All the more reason to solve it, wouldn’t you say? Justice delayed, my Prince, is justice deferred. And this is a far more sinister incidence of such deferral than usual. High time it was put right… if it can be.”

Jaw clenched, Iaon nodded. “So, tomorrow then… Egypt.”

“Yes. Where we’re going to pay the former King and Queen of the Argives a little visit in their retirement home by the Nile.”

“Why do I have a feeling they’re not exactly going to be glad to see us?”

“Because the evidence so far suggests strongly that they’re demigods with an ugly, deadly secret, and a great deal to lose if it’s revealed. Proving the Danaïds innocent is very likely to prove them guilty, even if only as accessories to the crime. If that happens, Hell will lose forty-nine prisoners and gain two. And should they be implicated, the punishment meted out to Lyceus and Hypermnestra is likely to be far worse than that inflicted on all the forty-nine. If the happily married couple start to suspect who we are, and they get the chance, they’ll stop us from finding out what we need to know in the simplest way they can. By killing us.”

Iaon felt the gun at his back shift a little, warm, as he moved closer to the God. Tired as he was, the excitement of the coming danger had already started singing in his veins. “It’s been tried.”

Grim silver eyes smiled down at Iaon, a little of the rising Moon caught in them as the God undid the Shadowcloak, shook the dust off it, and swirled it to rest around them. “So it has. We’ll lay our plans with care before we go. But first things first. Dinner?”

“Starving.”

They vanished.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Details on [the Danaïds,](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/96106033767/till-we-have-cases-ch-32-notes-and-links#danaids) [Zeus and the Cow Thing,](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/96106033767/till-we-have-cases-ch-32-notes-and-links#cows) [the Kriterion and Sherlock](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/96106033767/till-we-have-cases-ch-32-notes-and-links#kriterion), [that marsh,](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/96106033767/till-we-have-cases-ch-32-notes-and-links#lernaean) and [what Helen sneaked into the wine,](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/96106033767/till-we-have-cases-ch-32-notes-and-links#wine) along with other minor matters, can be found at [the Lotus Room blog. ](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/96106033767/till-we-have-cases-ch-32-notes-and-links)


	33. Of a Divine Consultation and a Day on the Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Consulting God and Prince Iaon head to Egypt to begin a perilous deep-cover investigation of the ancient Greek world's most notorious mass murder... knowing that if they're discovered, they're next on the list.
> 
>  **Trigger warnings** for mentions of slavery and of proposed sex involving master/slave roleplay. **Casual warnings** for disguise, misdirection, hieroglyphics, dripping, jurisdictional politics, covert surveillance, and the use of ylem on mortals.
> 
> Thanks once more to the excellent [Ivyblossom](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyblossom) for β-ing above and beyond the call of duty.
> 
>   
> [](http://tinyurl.com/holmsies)  
>   
> 
> 
> And thanks again to all of you who cast your vote for _Till We Have Cases_ in the Holmsies! You've made my year. 

The next morning, Iaon had just finished making tea and was preparing for a good rummage in the wooden bin on the counter where the Thalastrae left Mrs. Hudson’s scones and pitas and other breadstuffs the day after they were baked. It seemed likely enough that there might have been one or two left after the eating binge that both of them had indulged on coming home last night. But on lifting the lid, he found that this was a serious error of judgment, skewed way too far towards optimism. _Oh well,_ he thought, _I can do without for the moment. Maybe she’ll make us some more later._

He found the honeypot, got sticky from it, found its spoon (somehow behind the bread bin), got sticky from that, miraculously got some honey into his tea mug without getting anything else sticky, stirred, tossed the spoon in the sink, and wandered into the sitting room. His attention was mostly on the tea mug, which was why for several seconds Iaon didn’t notice the air in the middle of the room filling up with glowing white characters.

Iaon stopped still, then looked over his shoulder toward the hall. “Got a text coming in,” he said.

From the bathroom, through the closed door, there came a groan. “What’s it say?”

Iaon squinted at it. “Left-facing hawk, bunch of flowers, slug going left, string with a knot in it, head with big ears on a stick. Then, uhh… open hand, two circles and—what is that, a mace?—stacked up on top of each other. Stack of three boxes, somebody’s arm and a feather…”

 _“Oh!”_ Loud splashing came from the bathroom, and the sound of a great deal of water winding up on the bathroom floor. A moment later the God was in the sitting room, wrapped in shadow and with a towel wrapped over the shadow, dripping while he too peered at the text.

“She may be a river goddess, but Mrs. Hudson is _not_ going to like this,” Iaon said.

The God waved an unconcerned hand at him, reading the text. _“Thalastrae!”_

Iaon ran a hand over his face. “Something?” said a voice from behind the God.

“I’m dripping.”

“Shall we turn off gravity or would you prefer a greener alternative?” said another voice, this one from in front of him.

Iaon rubbed his forehead, wondering if he was _ever_ going to understand even _most_ of everything that got discussed around here. “Substandard attempt at humour and I’m _still dripping,”_ said the God, waving the text along to a second page.

Another folded towel floated in from somewhere and dropped itself in front of him. The God stepped onto it. A third one appeared and settled itself onto the wet carpet where he’d been standing: handprints started appearing on it, produced by whichever of the Thalastrae was hunkered down by it and patting it to get it to soak up more water.

“Most inconvenient,” the God growled. “Would have much preferred that this arrive later in the day.”

“Inconvenient why?” Iaon said.

“We’ll need two trips,” the God said. “I dislike that, there’s a chance it might attract unwanted attention. However, can’t be helped.”

“Attention from who?”

“Whom,” the God said, waving the text away entirely. “Never mind, Iaon. We’re needed by the Nile.”

“Good thing I had my shower early, then,” Iaon said.

“After what you made me do just after dawn, don’t know that you had much choice,” said the God, turning a shadowy grin on Iaon.

 _“Made_ you do! I seem to remember a request.”

“Assuming there had been such then I’m sure—”

 _“Several_ requests in fact, sounding increasingly like _begging—”_

“Oh, come now, Iaon. I’ve never begged for anything in my life.”

Iaon simply smiled at the floor for a moment. At those times when the God needed to be confronted about having somewhat distanced himself from the truth, Iaon found it safest, initially, to fall back onto abstractions. “First time for everything…”

“Please, my Prince, not in front of the Thalastrae, you’ll corrupt them.”

“They’re grown nymphs,” Iaon said, “they’ll be fine, I’m sure.” He grinned too as he heard the softest under-the-breath chuckle from whichever of them was carrying the second towel away. “I don’t suppose there’s time enough for me to corrupt _you_ a little?”

“Unfortunately not, my Prince, the Work calls us.”

“Where are we headed?”

The God moved impatiently off his towel and started going through tablets piled up on the desk. “We’re going walking in Memphis. So go get dressed.”

“Formal? Informal?”

The God looked him over critically. “Dressy casual,” he said. “We’re meeting a fairly senior God.”

Iaon nodded. “Hot there today?”

“Iaon,” the God said, “it’s Egypt. It’s _always_ hot.”

“The good helmet this time, then,” Iaon said, and turned toward the sitting room door. “Some of what I was feeling back in Babylon was you, but some of it really _was_ the Sun. Don’t mind the extra weight if I’ve got the protection.”

He headed for the stairs. “Besides—” the God said as Iaon was halfway to the door.

Iaon stopped, looked back at him.

“The horsehair crest on that helmet…”

“Makes me look taller?”

“No.”

Iaon sighed, resigned. But then the God swallowed. Iaon heard it; then saw—for the God was for the moment in profile against the window—the beautiful bump in that long sleek throat go up and down. “Makes you look quite… _military.”_ And as he said it, his voice dropped about a third of an octave.

Iaon’s eyebrows went up. _Oh really…!_

Smiling, he trotted up the stairs.

***

Iaon felt the heat before the Shadowcloak had even been whirled off them. In that first moment’s flicker of sensation, from darkness, everything went—by comparison to the sitting room in the House—blindingly bright; that hard hot blue sky arching overhead, broad distant horizons spread all around them, the Sun’s heat immediately evident.

The spot where they stood was a wide-ridged hilltop, mostly dirt and stones and pale beige sand, with here and there some tufts of low coarse grass bleached a dry yellow-white—a reminder of how quickly any patch of ground in this part of the world became useless without water. They had arrived looking westward, Iaon immediately saw, for down below them, twisting lazily through the otherwise dun-and-golden landscape, were twin serpent-curves of lush green land, the far one broken by the walls and outward-scattered, built-up townlands of a great white city. Between the two green curves, sheened with the high bright light of day, the great Nile slid stilly past. Patches of brief glitter dappled it where the wind touched its surface, brightening and vanishing again, and all along it wakes from passing shipping caught the sunlight too, brief silver-burning scratches of noon light against the river’s near-sky blue.

A breeze blew at their backs, stirring the armoured straps of Iaon’s _pteryges_ kilt and whispering through the upstanding horsehair of his helmet’s crest. It did a little to mitigate the heat of that tyrannical sun, but not very much. _Gods, it’s like standing in front of a forge,_ Iaon thought, _you feel it all up and down your body from a distance—_

And then he realized something. Not all the heat was coming from above them. He really _was_ feeling it on one side of his body.

Iaon turned and was surprised to see a tall dark-skinned man, slenderly but strongly muscled, standing just a few paces to one side of them and gazing out over the view. The man was tunicless and crisply kilted in pleated white linen and sandaled in pale-tanned leather, the straps bound up crosswise about his calves. Like most sensible Egyptian people he was wearing one of those long headdresses they favored to keep the sun off his bare scalp. _Funny, though, this one’s not linen, it’s almost like—_

The man turned toward them, and it wasn’t the clothes or the attributes that struck Iaon dumb for a moment. _Feathers!_ Iaon thought, astonished. Because those _were_ feathers spreading down over the strong shoulders, and for a second, while the great fierce bird-head turned and fixed its attention on him, Iaon froze. Sleek, dark, the head was that of a _hierax,_ the highest-flying falcon of all and the swiftest bird that flew: slate-feathered, but pale cream with some brown speckling under the chin, and with twin broad dark streaks on each side under the eyes. Those eyes, on either side of the sharp curved beak, caught Iaon’s gaze, held it, blazed. They weren’t the dark eyes of the mortal bird: they were the burning gold of the Sun. In fact—and Iaon shivered once in awe to realize it—they _were_ the Sun. It was more than symbolism. It was mere fact.

He swallowed, stunned. The idea of animal-headed gods had always previously struck Iaon as a bit funny because of the statues he’d occasionally come across on his travels—the artistry perhaps not always what might’ve been desired, the imagery often looking incongrously pasted-together, a bit ridiculous. Now he understood that the problem lay in trying to render something so vital in such a static medium. The original, Iaon now saw, was no cobbled-together assembly of man and beast. This was _life_ , and more to the point, immortal life, regarding him out of great fierce golden eyes while also describing its own abilities in the perfect shorthand of symbol: the swiftness of the hawk and the towering heights to which it rose, the acuteness of its vision and the certainty with which it arrowed down to strike its prey, the danger and the inescapable power of it. All these were looking at him, shining like the Sun they stood in for and in whose name they did battle against dark things. The effect was not merely intimidating. It was overwhelming.

And then without warning the eyes narrowed just slightly, in a way a bird’s eyes couldn’t, and the beak dropped open in what was plainly a smile; and the power and the danger were suddenly tempered and mitigated by humour and a sense of welcome.

“Heru Berutet,” said the God as he draped the Shadowcloak over his arm, “good morning.”

“Just gone noon, actually,” Horus said in a clear sharp tenor, and smiled at the God. “Your timing’s impeccable.” He shook his head. The hawk-feathers ruffled in the breeze and scattered light about his shoulders and across the gold-and-enamel collar he wore like sudden bright rain. Then the great bird’s head was gone and there was a man’s head there, appropriately hawk-nosed and very handsome—auburn-eyed and surprisingly tawny-haired against the dark skin, the hair very short, hardly more than a warm golden haze over his skull.

Iaon, having got his breath back, took his helmet off, tucked it under one arm, and bowed a little as the other approached. It occurred to him as he straightened that if the Consulting God had been born of Khemish deities, he might have looked like this… and the look was most attractive. _Not that there’s anything wrong with the paleness, mind you, it’s just that the contrast…_

Iaon _ahem_ med himself back into paying-attention mode as Horus offered the God an arm to clasp. “God-who-Consults,” he said, “ _Kekui-p-Khart:_ well met at last.”

The God smiled inside his shadows, as poor as usual at hiding his response to even implied praise, and clasped the other’s arm in return. “You make it sound like you’ve been waiting a while.”

“And so I have. Who hasn’t heard of the doings of the _Khaib-t neter,_ the Divine Shadow who raises up Light from darkness?”

“Well,” Iaon said, “ _some_ haven’t. One of the things that keeps some of us busy...”

The hawk grinned at him. Iaon grinned back: the expression was strangely infectious. “Which is _why_ we hear of his doings everywhere. And as for you, _Sesh heri metut Neter_ , your fame far precedes you.” He reached out to clasp arms with Iaon as well.

Iaon smiled at the compliment, though a little embarrassed at not understanding the epithet, and took the other’s arm, bracing himself for the touch. There was that familiar burning, but slightly different in nature: acute, a fierce hot sense of blinding light, doubtless pitiless and deadly if directed as a weapon, but for the moment plainly tempered for Iaon’s sake. “Sorry if my Egyptian’s a tad rusty…”

“Great Scribe of the Words of the God, he called you, all very flattering I’m sure but _so_ unsubtle,” said the Consulting God, in that particular tone of restrained amusement that he used when people were praising Iaon but he either didn’t like them getting too enthusiastic about it, or privately approved but didn’t want it to go to Iaon’s head. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t care to be, so instead of wasting time trying to get on my good side via the Prince, can we simply dispense with the buttering-up and get _on_ with it?”

Iaon gave the God a sidewise look of the sort meant to silently advise him that his concerns about Iaon’s head were unnecessary. But Horus was looking briefly confused. “’Buttering’?”

“Sorry. It’s northern,” Iaon said. “You put it on bread instead of oil.”

The God rolled his eyes. Horus grinned, though. “Linguistics aside, your patience is in good order,” he said with a dry amused look. “You’re both very welcome. I thought it was important that we meet here first, so that I’d have time to show you the ground. Or rather, show you _to_ the ground, so it knows you have Our leave to be here.”

The capital letter was audible, but Horus didn’t seem to be using it as a personal-corporate pronoun, the way Semiramis sometimes had when she was feeling particularly sniffy. “The Ennead,” Horus said, perhaps catching something in Iaon’s expression: “the Great Nine—the chief Company of Gods. There are many others, but they’re administratively junior.”

“Minions,” said the God with a sniff.

“Not something you’d say to their faces, my God,” Iaon murmured.

“Especially not when some of their faces have crocodile teeth,” Horus said under his breath, and flashed that grin at Iaon again. Once more Iaon smiled right back, because it was disarming. And then the thought occurred to him: _is he_ flirting _with me? Right in front of the God? Oh my._ Yet it was flattering, especially coming from such a _fit_ young god—

Iaon squashed that thought down hard. “At any rate,” Horus said, “first of all, God-who-Consults, I wanted to thank you for taking the time to send me your preliminary case notes. Matters of cross-pantheon justice, especially when mortals or demigods are involved, sometimes get so bogged down in jurisdictional issues and power games among the principals that those who should be most engaged in solving them decide not to bother at all. _This_ case, though…” Horus shook his head.

“Has been lying in the shadows a long while,” the God said, “unresolved. And you greatly welcome this chance to tidy up some messy loose ends.”

“Yes,” Horus said. “I should tell you that your Investigator’s office has been in touch with mine about the suspects you desire to interview. Lord Hermes was apparently somewhat concerned that we might consider this case too cold. But we reckon things a bit differently around here, perhaps.” He grinned a slightly predatory grin. “No case that’s less than a thousand years old is _anything_ like cold yet.”

“What did you make of it?” Iaon said.

Those keen eyes rested on Iaon thoughtfully. “At the time I found it troubling from beginning to end,” Horus said, “but there was little interest among my, ah, superiors, in looking into the matter any further once the court in Argos had reached a verdict.”

“Meaning no disrespect to your mighty father,” the Consulting God said, in the soft dry tone that told Iaon that was exactly what the God _meant_ to mean, “but the noble and most excellent Ra-Harakhti, especially when in his don’t-bother-me-I’m-dead-right-now Osiris mode, is known in other pantheons for his somewhat easygoing management style. Not to mention his tendency to cast his powerful and intelligent son in the role of overachieving ‘crusading prosecutor’ with a reputation to establish and an axe to grind.”

Horus cleared his throat, a sound that struck Iaon as strangely like that of a fist-borne hunting bird about to cough up the bones and feathers from a recent meal. “Yes, well,” Horus said, “such rumours do get about.”

“Also,” said the God, “likely enough he little desired to possibly stir up trouble between your pantheon and ours at a sensitive time. The murders were sensational, there was a great deal of bad publicity surrounding them, and the trial seemed to settle the matter. It would have been quite normal for him to ask the Olympians to downplay any further interest in what would have been seen locally as a foreign attempt to destabilize the mortal government of one or both of the pair of powerful nomes where Danaus and Aegyptus had ruled.”

“Bad enough when mortals pull such stunts on one another’s governments,” said Horus. “But when Gods are seen as complicit? That’s the way to set a whole region afire with war. Not just on Earth, but in Heaven. Better avoided entirely.”

He folded his arms. “But now you give me an excuse to raise this matter again. And frankly, that’s more than welcome.”

“As if the desire to see truth prevail is ever an _excuse,”_ the God said, gently scathing.

The Hawk-god looked at him sidelong. “You sound like my Auntie Ma’at,” he said. His tone was both resigned and approving. “Let’s just call it—not so much a pretext, but a justification, for looking into this matter further. After all, what’s left of it has been lying hidden in plain sight in my own personal jurisdiction for some time. I couldn’t be seen to be making too much of my own—” He looked away, scowling. _“—feelings_ on the matter. Otherwise some factions in our own pantheon would have claimed that I was stirring up old trouble to increase my own political capital.”

Iaon blinked at that. “Sorry, great Horus, I think I’m missing something here. How’s any of this _your_ responsibility?”

“Well, because _this_ is,” Horus said, and swept an arm at the view before them. “I’m the patron of the nome in which Men-nefer here lies. Everything you see here, Prince, from those little bumps—” he waved at three small sharp shapes rearing bright and white even through the haze on the northern horizon— “down to that bend in the river southward: all this is under my care. _I’m_ the one who people in this neighborhood pray to when things need done… and prayers to other gods from people here get redirected to me for handling. So the suggestion that I might not _notice_ something so blatant as those who’ve possibly committed multiple murder, or might purposely be turning a blind eye—”

Iaon, looking into those eyes, knew that there wasn’t much they’d be blind to. “Yes, I could see where that might rankle.”

“Political necessity,” the God murmured. “It’s an ugly thing. Let’s see how we can assist you in rectifying matters. Show us, if you would, the ground.”

Horus nodded, pointed. “Over that way—”

Iaon looked where the Hawk-god was indicating. On the far side of the city across the river lay a small lake all surrounded by the verdant green of palms and wetlands and cultivated fields. And on the near side of that, not far from the main road that ran up along the Nile from the northern gates of inner Memphis, there lay, all by itself amid more tall waving greenery, a long rectangle of white walls. The space they contained looked small from here, but Iaon guessed that the long side of the rectangle was easily a quarter-hour’s walk long.

“That’s their estate,” Horus said. “I don’t like to bring the two of you physically any closer than this, God-who-Consults. The suspects are after all demigods, both of them; even though they’ve been here as long as they have, it’s uncertain what kinds of abilities they possess besides the typical long life…”

“Yes,” the God murmured, his attention on the villa and its grounds. “And Hypermnestra has blood ties to your own pantheon, does she not.”

“Correct. If they were here and either her or her husband’s attention happened to be turned this way, even this distance might be too close for wisdom. However, I have intelligence that they’re not at home. They’ve gone down the River to the gardens of Rostu’a on a pleasure cruise with a few acquaintances, and won’t be back until tonight.”

“Excellent,” the God said. “We won’t be lingering long today in any case: there are still some preparations to make at home.”

“All right. Meanwhile, let me show you the place as I see it.”

A moment later Horus was looking that way with the great falcon’s face once more. And less than a breath later Iaon had to gasp, for he found himself seeing past the river, past the white city, as if with a hawk’s eyes. Everything leapt out in minute detail, preternaturally sharp. Even the God took a sudden deep breath at the sight.

The long white wall Iaon had been squinting to see from such a distance was now plain. He could see that it was topped with bronze spearheads, set too far apart to serve as a deterrent to anyone actually getting over the wall; they were purely ornamental. _And there’s a message without a word spoken: we’re rich enough to be able to waste good bronze on something essentially useless._ But the wall itself was four or five times the God’s height. _Enough of a deterrent by itself…_

Inside the outer boundary wall lay a small beautiful estate in the Egyptian style. Graveled walks wandered through ornamental plantings of palm and flowering acacia. Little stone-built canals ran in orderly manner between various outbuildings and delicate pavilions, silken-awninged or roofed in ornately carved planks of precious woods. Amongst these little pleasaunces lay scattered small square pools, carpeted with blue-white waterlilies or bristling with tall rushes that stirred in the breeze. In one of them, Iaon saw a fish’s bright side wink silver at the sun as it rose to the surface for a passing fly and sank away again.

At the center of all this understated luxury, surrounded by a strip of wide soft lawn, was a rectangular white house, low and long, colonnaded on the side where the main path from the front doors led to the gate, the pillars of the sheltering colonnade painted with layers of pointed scarlet petals around their capitals. The outer walls were pierced with numerous long windows, and on the inside wide open doorways and more windows gave from most of the rooms onto a central courtyard where, in the midst of a raised central tank, a fountain played.

“Very gracious,” the God said under his breath, while intently scrutinizing the view he was being shown. “A perfect setting for people living the lifestyle of the virtuously retired.”

“Exactly so,” said Horus. “For the four and a half decades they’ve lived in the House of the Lilies, Lynceus and Hypermnestra have conducted lives marked by a tasteful minimum of engagement and a marked preference for their own company… though they’re by no means hermits, because that would in itself attract more attention than they’d like. The social circles they move in are interestingly limited. Occasionally they make friends among younger people initially attracted by their seeming youth and their obvious wealth—but these seem always to drift away after ten or fifteen years, when they notice that _they’re_ aging and these two are not. They have some friends among older members of Memphitic society: more than of the younger ones, perhaps, because the older ones tend to die before noticing that the nice young couple are seemingly stuck being so young. Or if these old people _do_ notice it, and then mention it, others tend to dismiss their concerns as signs of dotage… or jealousy. One or two of the older people who’ve noticed and mentioned something of the kind, and who were too sharp of mind to be dismissed as senile, have had peculiar accidents a short time after visiting them.”

Iaon broke away from the vision to look thoughtfully at Horus. “And you haven’t been able to prove anything in those cases, have you.”

“No,” said the Hawk-god. The single word was very restrained, but there was no missing the slow quiet anger under it.

“I suppose there’s a good reason you haven’t just sent some priests in there to search the place for the missing _oinichoe_ ,” Iaon said.

“Until just now,” Horus said, “until the God contacted me, we wouldn’t have known that was what needed to be found. But now that we _do_ know—well, the human bureaucracy here is far too full of ‘friends of friends’, people who hear about something that’s about to happen, and who’re willing to send a quick message to someone for gold or a favour down the road. Then the priests arrive, and courtesy of the suspects themselves, or a slave or servant who has orders about just what to do if investigators show up, the evidence is already gone. Sunk in the Nile, smuggled out to be buried in some desert sandhill exactly like a million others…” He shook his head. “Better to let the God-who-Consults come quietly in and do what he’s done so well elsewhere.”

Iaon turned his attention back to the distant view, fascinated by the way it instantly became less distant. “Don’t suppose you can see inside there?” Iaon said.

Horus shook his head. “I can see what the hawk sees. And what the Sun can see, _where_ the Sun can see. No more.”

“Which is where we come in,” the God said. “Because seeing what’s in shadow, and dealing with it, is our business.” His eyes narrowed a little. “And there _is_ a fair amount of shade down there,” he added, as if musing. “Over by that leftward short wall, by the small gate. Tradesman’s entrance, surely. The plantings over there are quite tall. All those acacias, they run nearly to that long water garden behind the rear apartments…”

Iaon’s eyes widened a bit, and he cleared his throat. “Ah. My God…”

“Oh my dear Prince!” said the God, in what Iaon recognised immediately as beautifully manufactured shock. “You don’t imagine I’m considering going over the wall like some kind of _burglar?_ Whatever would people think?” And the astonished tone gave way to one of equally perfectly simulated innocence. “We’re going to walk right in the front door, like proper guests of the house.”

Horus glanced over at the God, giving him an amused look out of those fierce bird-eyes. “That’s just as well,” he said. “Because I understand that great Hermes sometimes winks at the details of what you do on his business, especially where the legal code hasn’t yet caught up to the way you think.” The amusement there, in fact, was unmistakable. “But law in the Two Lands has had nearly three thousand years to codify itself in the most dreadful detail. Whatever you do to acquire your evidence can’t be done in any way that violates local law. Breaking and entering…”

“When one’s already entered by being escorted across the threshold by the owners of the property,” the God said, his voice rich with the strangest combination of smugness and innocence, “there’s no need to break a single thing.”

Horus cocked his head at the God in a way that struck Iaon as rather birdlike. “It’s going to be very interesting to see how you pull this off,” he said. “And what you find.”

“I expect it will,” said the God. “But if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll be reviewing all the pertinent law tonight before I turn in.”

Iaon threw him a later-for- _you_ look. “I wouldn’t even begin to know where to start with _that_ ,” Iaon said to Horus. “But I _do_ know how to tell when he’s getting, shall we say, creative with his interpretations.”

“All know the tenacity of the Blogger of the God when it comes to protecting his divine Colleague,” Horus said. “It’s an easy guess that that includes protecting him from himself.” And the hawk-face smiled. “I’m content.”

“Hawk of the Sun,” said the God, all the artifice and levity gone from his voice now, “I promise you this: I will do nothing to damage your case. I desire this prosecution’s success as much as you do… if not more.”

“With that too,” Horus said, “I’m more than content.”

“Then there’s one way yet that you can content _me,”_ the God said. “I’ve no intention of doing this work and then finding our evidence is useless due to some obscure double-jeopardy rule, or because these two were exonerated in another jurisdiction.”

Horus shook his head, also shaking away his falcon-headed aspect as he turned back to them. “Have no fear. What you’ll be bringing us will be construed as new evidence, sufficient to trigger a fresh trial in this venue. In fact, I can guarantee you that.”

“Really?” Iaon said. “How?”

“Because, assuming the Consulting God finds the evidence he seeks, I’ll be serving as Advocate for the Gods of the Two Lands at trial. As patron God of the Memphis nome I’m the district’s Attorney as well. And also, in a case where evidence is produced or sourced here, the head prosecutor for the trial to follow.” Horus raised his elegant eyebrows in a rather helpless way. “It’s rare to have so many roles require service all at once. But I suppose I shouldn’t complain.”

The God laughed softly. “If you didn’t want to be so much in demand, you should never have done such a good job of vanquishing Set the Destroyer. And you _definitely_ shouldn’t have come back from the dead.”

Horus laughed too. “True. I’m told I’ve set a dangerous precedent. …But be that as it may, I’d have to be at the trial anyway for the post-sentencing stage as well, as since I came back I’m now _also_ the Introducer of the Dead—the one who leads souls one way or another after their hearts’ weighing in the Scales. To the Tuat, or to the Field of Bulrushes: I’m the one who knows the way.”

Iaon nodded at that: the parallel to Hermes’s role as Conductor of Souls seemed very close. “So if everything goes well, and the Danaïds are declared innocent… then what?”

“Spiritually speaking, they’re all both Argive citizens, by legacy, and subjects of the Crowns of the Two Lands by birth,” Horus said. “If they’re exonerated, and especially if they’re adjudged to have been unjustly condemned to afterlife punishment, then they’ll be asked to choose to which afterlife place-of-reparation they want to be assigned. And then the punishment of those who’re genuinely guilty will have to be determined.”

They all stood there in silence for a few moments, looking down at the distant bustle of the White City. “But first things first,” Horus said to the God. “What will you do if you can’t find what you seek here?”

“Then I’ll go back to Argos,” said the God, “and I will leave not a stone unturned from Nauplion to Lerna until I find that second _oinichoe._ I will find it though it’s been ground to powder and broadcast like the seed in spring or scattered in the sea. Because if it has, those facts too will yield their secrets to me.” And he smiled, then, inside his shadows—a look that made Iaon shiver with the grimness of it. “But unless I’m very much mistaken—”

“Which he isn’t, usually,” Iaon said.

“—then there’ll be no need for that. One way or the other, the truth of what we need to know about who is responsible for the slaughter of the Aegyptids is right down there.” And he flung out one shadow-clad arm and pointed at the low white house by the river. “I’ll find the evidence that proves the truth of my case and I will bring it out of that house in my own hands.”

Horus nodded. “Before we part,” he said, “I must warn you. This is not Babylon. The matter in which you’re intervening is neither so clear-cut nor so vital as a homegrown plot against a nation’s throne, and against that nation’s own Gods who directly support it. If things go wrong for you in what you’re about to attempt, or if the law is broken in what you do… then the Gods here cannot be seen to have any part in what’s happened. The Ennead will have no choice but to formally disavow any knowledge of your actions.”

Iaon bristled a bit at that. “You’re willing to let him come in and do this job for you,” he said, “but if he gets in trouble, he’s on his own?”

“Peace, my Prince. It’s the normal understanding.” The God sounded darkly amused. “Political necessities. They’re annoying, as I said, but we’ll work around them and produce the result regardless.” He turned back to Horus. “One last thing. Will you send me what details you have on those ‘peculiar’ cases?”

“With pleasure, God-who-Consults. They’ll arrive at the House of Shadows as soon as I can get back to the office.”

Iaon smiled at the thought that in Egypt even the House had an epithet. “Thank you,” the God said.

“So when will you start work?”

“Immediately. We’ll be back in Egypt first thing tomorrow morning, after I sort out some logistical matters back home. And we’ll be in Memphis as soon as it’s practicable; I need to consult with Iaon as to the scheduling.”

“Very well,” Horus said, and reached out to clasp the God’s arm again, and then Iaon’s. “Take care, gentlemen. Take very great care. …And good hunting.”

And a second later there was nothing to be seen but a great falcon mounting up into the noonday sun, and, a few breaths later, lost in its glare and vanished away.

***

By the time they got home, the sitting room of the House was already full of downhanging curtain after curtain of glowing white hieroglyphic text. The God hung the Shadowcloak up and immediately began reading through the texts, one after another. Iaon made tea and brought him some, but by the time it was ready the God was standing frozen in front of one text, still as a statue, with one hand spread out to it as if he could feel from the air above its surface whatever truths it was hiding.

The Prince knew better than to disturb the God when he was in this mode, still digesting the facts. Later he’d ask to be talked through whatever the God had discovered, and might then do some good. In the meantime Iaon went to the shelf where he kept such things and dug out some research materials of his own—several tablets and some papyri and written parchments he’d accumulated while researching the Byblos-based drugs gang that had given the authorities in Aegina so much trouble until he and the God got involved. He spent a good while referring back and forth between his closely-annotated map of Egypt and his notes on the Investigator’s post-case interrogation of the criminals, during which time the God drifted away to lie stretched out on the couch with his folded hands pressed to his lips, deep in thought. Iaon’s tea went cold while he made new notes; he went for more, came back, sat down in his chair and pulled the most well-worn piece of papyrus to him again.

“None for me?” said the voice from the couch.

“Didn’t know if it was just going to get cold again.” Iaon got up once more, grabbed the God’s mug, disposed of the old tea and fetched him some that was fresh and hot. Then he resettled himself in his chair, gladly stretching his legs out by the fire, for as autumn crept onward and the sun came in through the front windows for less time each day, the room had been growing cooler in the afternoons.

Iaon reached for his map again, studying it; then pursed his lips and turned it upside down. “I’ve never really understood this. Who was it decided that Lower Egypt should be in the north and Upper Egypt should be in the south?”

“Cultural thing, Iaon.”

“Meaning you’ve no idea.”

“If I ever bothered to have one, I’ve long since deleted it.”

Iaon pushed the map away. “So,” he said, looking up at the texts, which the God had waved into dimness and pushed together and off to one side. They hung there now before the windows like so many panels of strangely-patterned lace curtaining, softly filtering the afternoon light. “What about those? Were they worth the reading?”

“Difficult to say,” the God said, still gazing up into the air. “They certainly don’t clarify matters. Handling this situation to best advantage may prove… a bit complicated.”

Iaon leaned back in his chair, drumming his fingers on its arm. “Complicated” had occasionally in the past been Consulting-God-code for “dangerous”—either when the God didn’t want Iaon to worry, when his innate certainty that nothing was too much for him to handle got the better of him, or when his desire to spring the great surprise of a case on Iaon without foreshadowing or forewarning was in operation. Right now, though, Iaon suspected that it meant the God was still working without enough data to make him happy—never a comfortable situation for him—and was hedging his bets.

“What did they say?” Iaon said, glancing toward the texts and back at the God.

“Not as much as I’d have liked. These deaths—there were some common elements, but not the kind that would enable one to draw useful conclusions.” Iaon could feel a scowl forming inside the God’s shadows. “The dead, two men and a woman, were all in old age but not physically or mentally infirm. All had known the owners of the House of Lilies for some decades. Beyond the fact that they had Lynceus and Hypermnestra in common as social contacts, the only connection among them was their class, which was high, and their wealth, which was considerable. Their visits weren’t particularly unusual; all three had made numerous casual unannounced visits to the house in the past. These visits would have seemed to be more of the same. Yet within a day of _these_ visits—all months apart from one another—all three of these people died.”

“And not accidentally, you’re thinking.”

The God sat up, swung his feet off the sofa, reached out to the tea, took a long drink of it and flopped back against the cushions, cradling the mug. “The first man was fishing in the grounds of his estate—apparently got pulled out of his chair when he hooked a particularly big perch in an ornamental fishpond. Lost his footing, fell and struck his head on the coping of the pond’s edge, rolled into the water. Drowned.”

“On dry land,” Iaon murmured.

“Iaon, there’s no desert on Earth dry enough for a man _not_ to drown in if someone’s only willing to help,” the God said softly. “The second man… old but spry and alert, to hear his family and friends tell it. Killed crossing a street; a horsecart ran him over. One witness insists he saw it coming—just froze, didn’t move, and the drover didn’t have time to stop. And the woman…” The God pulled his legs up and wrapped his arms around them, resting his chin on his knees. “Oldest of the three, physically weak but active of mind and very vain: insisted on being taken out in a palanquin every day for a walk by the Nile along with a great retinue of slaves and household officials. The morning after her visit to the House of the Lilies, down they all went to the river as usual, and her people sat her down on the quayside in her accustomed place to take the air. And when everyone’s attention was elsewhere for a moment, suddenly she’s off out of her palanquin, and _splash_ , straight into the Nile and sinks like a stone. And before they can do a thing to try to get her out…”

“Wait, don’t tell me, I know. Along comes a _krokodeilos…”_

 _“Meshu,_ they call them there,” said the God. “Three of them, actually. Typical, you wait for hours for just one to come along and then a whole crowd of them turn up at once…”

Iaon knew by now the sound of the God being purposefully obscure. He let it go by and just sat there shaking his head, for none of this made any sense to him. “And all three of them within a day of visiting. …Coincidence?”

“The Universe is rarely so lazy,” the God said, and hissed out a breath afterward, as if for some reason even speaking the phrase annoyed him.

Silence fell for a while, deep enough to hear the fire crackling softly to itself. “Well,” Iaon said at last. “Tomorrow we go to Egypt again…”

“But not straight to Memphis. For best effect, we’re going to need to look like we’ve been on the road a while. And we _will_ have been there at least a couple of days early.”

Iaon put his eyebrows up. “We’re going there in some kind of disguise?”

“Why, no, Iaon, I thought we’d just walk up to their front door in our proper persons and demand that they tell us everything they know but nobody else does about murders committed outside of mortal living memory.”

Iaon rolled his eyes in amusement, declining delivery on the God’s sarcasm. “Well, if you mean we’re going to be walking, those two days… That’s, what, just three hundred stadia or so. For someone in your physical condition, it’ll hardly be more than a pleasant stroll.”

“Walking long boring distances. Like a mortal. _Incredibly_ tedious.”

“It’ll be easy. Possibly even pleasant!”

The God groaned in anguish, but Iaon was already caught up in the novelty of the idea. He’d always loved having the _time_ to see new places, and though the God could sweep the two of them away anywhere in the blink of an eye, getting him to _stay_ in a place after business there was concluded was something of a trial. “No need to push the pace, even. A hundred fifty stadia each day, that’s just an easy amble down the beautiful lush Nile Valley. The nicest kind of legwork.”

The God groaned again in exaggerated disgust, throwing his head back against the cushions to glare at the ceiling. “I’m reliably informed my legs don’t _need_ work.”

The memory of kissing and biting his way gently up and down them some nights previous made Iaon lick his lips once thoughtfully; the backs of the God’s knees had proven astoundingly sensitive, something Iaon had come to suspect from casually acquired data on the various occasions when he’d eaten Ch’inese takeout on the sofa with the God’s legs stretched “helpfully” across his lap. “Happens that’s true. Nonetheless… Eight hours a day tops, just strolling along, with good long breaks for meals. And remember the Physician saying that a little fresh air and sunshine wouldn’t hurt you?”

The moan the God produced in response was intended to be piteous to hear. Iaon had trouble keeping himself from snickering.

But then something occurred to him a little belatedly, distracting him. “But you’re… Wait. Are you actually considering leaving the Shadowcloak _home?”_

A distressed little whimper came from behind the door, and Iaon wasn’t particularly surprised to hear it. It was surprising how how odd, indeed how _disturbing_ , the very idea was. He was having trouble imagining the God outside their House without the Cloak about him.

“I think I must, Iaon,” the God said, his head turning toward the door and away again, almost as if he felt a bit guilty. “At the very least, it would certainly be unwise to _use_ the Cloak anywhere near Memphis when Lynceus and Hypermnestra are at home. And considering that not even Horus was entirely certain about their abilities, it’s not beyond belief that one or even both of them might be sensitive to the presence of a powerful divinely-sourced artifact nearby even when it _wasn’t_ in active use.” He shook his head. “Nor in the circumstances can we be certain that any protections the House might weave about it to prevent its detection would be effective. We’ll be a long way from home, far from my power base, deep in another pantheon’s territory. And though Horus has ensured that the land won’t react negatively to my presence there, the limited nature of the sanction means there won’t be _positive_ reaction and support, such as we had in Babylon from Marduk.” He shook his head. “We daren’t risk it. Westie will bring us most of the way, and come back to fetch us when we’re done and ready for pickup.”

This time from behind the door where the Shadowcloak hung on its peg came a moan not so different from the one the God had produced moments earlier, and it wrung Iaon’s heart. He sighed, got up and went over to the Cloak to stroke it. “A few things to think about, then,” he said as he ran his hands down the soft dark length of the Shadowcloak, and its shivering began to quiet a little. “Food.”

The God waved an unconcerned hand. “So boring.”

“Oh no, my God, you don’t get to start _that_ when you’re going to be taking actual physical exercise from morning till night! When your transport’s on the road unassisted, it becomes a priority. Otherwise the Work suffers. Food and drink; we have to think about what we’ll bring. Also money.”

“We’ve got some around.”

“Is it the right kind, though? If we just hand them drachmae, or those shekels they loaded us up with in Babylon, we’re going to get looked at. We need local cash… though not tons of it, for such a short time. In fact it’s better if we _don’t_ have tons of it…”

“That’ll fit in perfectly with our disguises,” the God said.

“And yes, about that. Just _who_ are we supposed to be, exactly? Besides someone Hypermnestra and Lynceus would actually let into their house as guests.”

The God’s eyes glinted through his shadows, and Iaon could feel him smiling. “You’re in best form, my Prince,” he said. “Which is good, because you’ll need to be. We’ll be respectable travelers on the road: men in trade.”

Iaon laughed. “You really think you’re going to get anybody to mistake us for merchants?”

“I don’t think so, Iaon,” the God said. “I know so.” And he leapt up off the couch.

Iaon got up too. “Respectable enough that they actually invite us in and let us look around for the _oinochoe?”_

The God rolled his eyes. “Iaon! Too much _effort_. They’re not only going to invite us to dinner, but if things go well they themselves are going to show us where the _oinichoe_ is. And ideally we’ll even get a confession.”

“If you pull this off…” Iaon said, shaking his head.

“It’ll be what? Amazing? Fantastic?”

The mockery was not only good-natured, but a bit excited, even eager. The God had something up his shadowy sleeve. “More than that. Show me!”

“Then let’s to the Chamber, my Prince.”

“You sure this isn’t just some plot to get me to compliment your legs again?”

“Is that the word we’re using now for what you did the other night, Iaon? ‘Complimenting’?”

“Just get in there and let’s see what you’ve got. Who knows, I might find time to compliment you some other way.”

***

Iaon half expected the God to have whatever he was preparing to show him stored away in the wardrobe or the dresser that stood in the same room as the Chamber’s couch. But instead the God led the way through that indefinite fourth wall of the Chamber into the anteroom of his Palace of the Mind.

The moon shone above them as usual, still and silver, but other than that the interior was monochrome—no memories scattered about the floor in bright-colored drifts like so many leaves in autumn. Iaon found himself wryly wishing, not for the first time, that the God was as tidy in the outer world as he was in his inner one. _Too much to expect, I suppose…_ All the many portals around the huge circular space were dark. White light shone on the sleek stone of the surrounding colonnades, level on level above them, and reflected brightly from the polished white floor. But into one broad spot on that floor it fell and illuminated nothing.

Iaon raised his eyebrows. “This is new,” he said, following the God over to that dark place.

“Not at all,” the God murmured, sounding amused. “Very, very old, in fact.”

The darkness was circular, as wide across as a tall man, and surrounded by an upraised border, like a single step of the same white stone of the floor. Inside that surround, itself about the width of a step, total darkness rose up perhaps a palm’s width above the level of the floor.

The God knelt gracefully down by it, reached down into that darkness… and came up with a handful of it, like water. He tilted the hand: the darkness poured down out of it again, was subsumed into the pool of darkness below.

Iaon stared. “What in Heaven’s name is _that?”_

"Ylem, Iaon. Unformed matter from the dark places between the stars.” In his cupped hand the God dipped up another handful. “The stuff of which worlds are made. Endlessly malleable, in the right hands. And mine are the right ones.”

Iaon looked on with wide eyes. “Can I touch it?”

“Briefly. Too long and it’ll seek to take shape from you. In fact it desires nothing more.”

“What, my shape in particular?” Iaon said as he knelt down by the God.

“Just shape in general,” the God said, pouring it gently from one hand to another. “The one great desire of the unmade is to be made. Here.”

He held his hand out, gesturing for Iaon to cup both of his. Iaon did, and into them the God gently poured what he held.

The ylem pooled there, and Iaon gazed into it, fascinated. It was very dark, but couldn’t really be called black, for it had no real colour at all. Light fell into it and simply vanished. Though it had substance, it had no weight, and Iaon breathed out and in and out again in wonder as he tried to understand the feel of what he was holding.

The God dipped a finger into it, pulled upward: a strand of ylem clung to his skin and followed him upward. Strangely, faintly, through his own skin or through the God, for a second Iaon heard the stuff speak in a tiny voice—or rather more like a chorus of voices—not in words as such, but nonetheless begging to be made into something, _anything._

Iaon shook his head: merely saying “Amazing…” about this seemed understating the case. “Why is it here?” he said. “What’s it for?”

The God reached out and took Iaon’s hands from underneath, tipping them to let the ylem flow back into the pool. “This,” he said.

He sat back on his heels a moment, resting folded hands against his lips in that typical “thinking” pose. Then he moved just one hand, reaching down into the pool. A moment later he pulled it out, describing an arc over the raised edge of the pool and down onto the white floor beyond it: and the darkness followed the gesture.

Iaon watched spellbound as the ylem-liquid ran up into the air in a slender cylindrical stream, and down again, and across the floor, pooling there around where the God’s fingertip rested on the stone. For a few moments it did so normally—if the word “normal” could ever be associated with anything like this—spreading slowly outward in a circle. But then the circle stopped spreading evenly. It went oval, then elliptical, then oblong. Appendages stretched out of it; a short blunt one, four longer ones—

The shape wavered at its edges, contracted in on itself, shifted on the floor. Iaon realised with a start that he was looking at a human shape, a manlike form, but one seemingly painted on the floor, a mere silhouette of someone lying prone.

Gracefully but very slowly, as if in intense concentration, the God waved his free hand at the stream of ylem. It cut off as sharply as if sliced with a knife and fell away, half the stream back into the pool, the other half into the silhouette on the floor. Then the God shifted around to face the floor-shape fully. He spread both hands over it, fingers wide: then bent over to rest his hands in the midst of the darkness.

It began to climb up his hands, up his wrists, gloving them more blackly than any shadow Iaon had ever seen the God wear. _How far is it going to go?_ Iaon thought in sudden concern. But the God straightened a little, drawing his hands upward, still palm-down. Once again the ylem followed his gesture, standing proud of the floor—though Iaon had to bend over a little, and look sideways, to see this, such was the impenetrable darkness of the stuff. It drew together, rounded upward, gaining thickness as well as width and length.

The darkness dripped off the God’s hands like oil into the dark man-shaped blackness beneath them, and still he raised them, and still the shape grew. As Iaon watched and the shape seemed to roughen somehow, he thought at first that this might be his eyes tricking him in the equivocal silvery light; they’d started to water as he tried to keep his gaze fixed on something so utterly and nonreflectively black. But then he realised how perfectly still the God was holding, and that he’d taken a long breath moments ago and hadn’t let it out. The absolute silence that had fallen around them made Iaon hold his own breath, made him stay as still as the God—

Between one blink and the next the dark shape on the floor developed an ebon sheen, a skin of swift liquidity, turning the darkness underneath it into something like a statue of black glass or obsidian. Then that sheen went dull and sank away into what lay beneath as water sinks into sand when a wave draws back from shore. And there on the floor lay a body.

The two of them let out their breaths at the same time, and Iaon gazed down in amazement at what the God had made. The body was that of a big man, broad-shouldered, brawny, with short-cropped dark hair, possibly Spartan to judge by the tilt of his eyes and the general set of his face. The God was sitting back on his heels again, his hands on his thighs now, both of them actually trembling a little against the dark linen of his khiton. He was even gasping for air.

“Are you all right?” Iaon said, reaching out to him, now that he dared to.

The God merely nodded. “It’s—intense, this work,” he said, starting to get control of his breath again. “Mind over matter. Not that matter ever wins where I’m concerned. Not for long. But there. There’s my disguise.”

Iaon was having trouble finding words. Mostly the God’s power manifested itself in abstract ways: the power of that amazing mind, though palpable, wasn’t concrete. But this, so visible, so _strange_ , was something else entirely, and was going to take some getting used to. “What is it?”

“A surface seeming,” the God said. “A semblance, gods call it. An outer skin of sorts, though it goes deeper… concealing even inner truths.”

“What do you do with it?” Iaon said. “I mean, how do you—”

“Put it on? Like clothes,” said the God. “Though one doesn’t take such a thing off as quite as easily; the longer you wear a semblance the more attached to you it gets.” Iaon could catch something second-hand from the God’s mind regarding that, a strange subdued feeling like the kind of smile you turn away from someone to avoid it being seen.

The God stood up, stretched a bit. Then he bent down and picked the body up by the shoulders—simply _lifted_ it as if it weighed almost nothing, and as he did it flattened and lengthened until it hung as limply from his hands as a cast-off chlamys or a coat. Iaon’s jaw dropped, for held this way the God’s creation looked exactly as a man’s skin would if you simply pulled it off him in one piece. Its eyes were closed, and Iaon shivered again, realising how very glad he was of that.

“Iaon?” The God was looking at him curiously. “Are you all right?”

“I could use some tea,” Iaon said immediately. And then, changing his mind: “The hell with that, I could use some _wine._ Possibly unmixed.”

The God chuckled. “It takes a few moments to get into one of these. Go on, go wait in the sitting room; I want to check this in better light and make sure I haven’t missed anything.”

Iaon went gladly. By the time he got into the kitchen he was already in two minds about the wine, feeling a little embarrassed by his reaction to what he’d just seen. _The bloody amphisboena bothered me less!_ Yet there was undeniably something eerie about the limp empty thing the God had held up in two hands like a cast-off khiton…

He shook his head and filled the kettle, starting it up. Down the hall he heard the door to the Chamber open, but stayed where he was for the moment, getting the tea down from its cupboard. “So,” he said, raising his voice a bit. "That’s how you did the Lady Xanthe."

From down the hall there came a snort as the God stepped into the bathroom. “Oh please, don't remind me. _Never_ has a semblance given me so much trouble. Every single time she _looked_ at you..."

Iaon half-smiled at that, suddenly amused. “And how are you blaming ‘her,’ my God? If she was another like what just happened in there—something you _made?_ Could it perhaps be that even _then_ you knew...?"

He heard the God clear his throat. _Embarrassed about something?_ Iaon thought. _Well, let it alone; give him something else to think about._ “But the first time would have been that ‘old herdsman’ who came to see me, wouldn’t it.”

“Mmm.” No embarrassment there: a sound of satisfaction, rather. “I worked hard on that, my Prince. Knew it was going to be under the hands of an expert. I spent simply _hours_ getting that wound right.”

Iaon had to smile. “It was nice work.”

“Thank you, my Prince. And this? What do you think?”

Iaon looked up at the figure standing in the doorway that led from the kitchen to the hall, and drew in a long breath. It was distinct and unveiled, and utterly unlike the one with whom Iaon shared the House. The big brawny frame, where the God was slim and lithe: a bit paunchy in front where the God had not an extra drachm of weight on him (except, Iaon thought privately, on that beautiful arse); hair straight and short-cropped and southern-coarse where the God’s waved long and silken; harsh broad features where the God’s were long and narrow; eyes close-set and dark instead of the tilted and changeably light ones visible even through shadow. But it was unmistakably the God’s mind behind them, and the strange eyes were dancing with his mischief and pleasure at Iaon’s consternation.

“I think this should confuse the picture nicely,” the God said, brushing at the workaday linen kilt he was wearing—smudged and dusty, the linen unbleached, the pleats going grimy at the edges from too much wear and not enough washing—and turning around to let Iaon see him from behind. _God, the size of those shoulders…_ Iaon thought, and then found himself suddenly sucking in breath at the rather more arresting sight of the crisscrossed stripes of pinkened skin across them, the old long-healed welts of someone who’d been repeatedly beaten with bundles of split palm canes, _oh God, no missing the way those heal jagged…_ And his eyes ran up to the neck above those shoulders and saw there, as the God came around to face Iaon again, the thin collar, the greened-bronze collar, with the crude iron rivet in it.

“What’s this?” Iaon said, going cold because he knew perfectly well what it was.

“It’s a slave’s collar, Iaon, surely you saw many such on your travels.”

“Take it off.”

“Ridiculous, it’s part of the ensemble—”

“Right the fuck _off!_ This _minute.”_ The very thought of such a thing on someone he loved, on the _God_ , got itself all entangled with the sudden memory of his father holding him all that while ago, saying _I have to go with the army so we can keep you safe from people who’d make slaves of you if they could…_

The God was rolling his eyes in exasperation, but as annoyance went it was fairly mild. _“Think,_ Iaon. There’s no way a respectable merchant like yourself would go on even the lowest-profile business trip without at _least_ one slave to be your eyes-behind and do the fetching and carrying.”

That was unfortunately true, which made it worse. “At least lose the scars, my God, I would _never_ treat a slave that way—”

“You didn’t, a previous master did,” the God said immediately, going over to the teapot to pour himself a mug. “You saw him beating me in the marketplace at Syene and made up a story to get him to sell me to you. Said I reminded you of the house-slave who taught you your first letters when you were a little boy. He bought the story because when he named you a price that was too high you purposely didn’t haggle it down far enough. He was happy to make a fucking foreigner pay him twice the going price for trash as long as he _knew_ you knew that was happening, you were happy to get me away from him, and I’ve been ridiculously grateful to you ever since. Satisfied?”

Iaon let out a frustrated breath. “You’ve given this some thought,” he said.

The eyeroll produced by the man now leaning on the counter was exactly the God’s, though Iaon was tempted almost to shield his eyes from it, it seemed to so impossibly clear and direct in the normal light of the sitting room. Iaon just wasn’t used to seeing his God’s expressions except by the Chamber’s starlight or more indistinctly, veiled in shadow. “Iaon. I give _everything_ some thought. _”_

Gods knew, this was also true. “Who am I then?”

“You’re a Mycenean dyestuff trader, down in Khem looking for better prices for murex, you’re tired of dealing with the middlemen in Athens and why wouldn’t you be, ripoff artists the whole lot of them, pushing the prices up so they can still hang onto their own overstuffed profit margins without suffering too much from the way the Persians are choking the market down to their preferred distributors in the eastern Mediterranean, especially Tyre and Sidon.” And it was _so strange,_ but also peculiarly compelling, to hear the God’s swift self-assured delivery coming out of a stranger’s face… “Fortunately Semiramis’s local-government people are too busy trying to bolster trade in the buffer states between them and the Ch’in influenced nomadic powers further east, and they don’t have time to police the Khemish trade situation the way they might have once when the government there was more robust and its economy was better. But the whole place is beginning to slide a bit; no particular surprise there. When an empire gets past its two thousandth year everybody really stops paying attention as much as they ought to, except for the powers further East who think it might really be _their_ turn to rule the world now. Not our problem at the moment, though. You quietly left Mycenae a couple of months ago, took ship to Cyprus and then from there across to Phoenicia to touch base with some suppliers and pick up the industry gossip and a few useful names of contacts who were looking for ways to wriggle out from under the Tyrian-purple thumb.”

Iaon opened his mouth to protest… then shut it again, curious against his will to see where the God was going with this. “There you waited long enough to let any possible interest in you drop off a bit, then caught a boat over to the Nile delta—to Canopus town, or Pikuat as this lot call it at the moment. That’s when your own slave died, the one you brought from home. He went skiving off when he should have been buying provisions for the two of you in the old town—ducked into a local beershop, got himself sozzled and then knifed in a brawl. All very inconvenient and extremely annoying, but you’d come this far and couldn’t afford to let it interfere with business. You hooked up as planned with a caravan heading for Upper Egypt and got off a month later at Syene, ostensibly to see the sights, because with two millennia’s worth of temples in one place who wouldn’t, all the tourists who go that far south stop there and at first look you’d seem to be just one more of them. But what you actually had in mind was touching base with traders in the Old Town to talk about a little cartel-busting… you, them, some southern Phoenician traders looking to do some shellfish business under the table, under cover of getting into wine trading for one of your Mycenaean connections. Next morning you were heading through the market on your way to the piers and a boat downriver when you ran across a slave being beaten. A countryman at that, a Lacedaemonian man, taken in war most likely and being cruelly ill-used. You could justify it as practicality—since you spoke the same language, he wouldn’t make a bad replacement for your dead slave—but truth is, sentiment was to blame, always such a weakness for you. Never mind, though, no sooner seen than bought, and that evening we’re on a boat off the island heading downstream for Herakleopolis, Memphis and points north.”

It all came out at the speed Iaon had become used to when the God was deducing, but this was different, like a _backwards_ deduction, something Iaon had never before heard from him. Iaon’s mouth simply dropped open. “That… _that_ was amazing!”

“All the more so because every bit of it could be true,” the God said, flashing a grin at Iaon.

“Well, not so fast,” Iaon said, giving the God a moment’s skeptical look. “The day an Argive considers a man from Lacedaemon a _neighbour—”_

“Oh, Iaon, and all this time I’ve been so sure you were too perfect to be mortal! Yet now I hear you thinking that if a Spartan was taken in war, he probably had it coming.” And the grin on that harsh, unfamiliar face went wry, even cynical, but there was still such affection about it. “My illusions are shattered.”

 _“Oi,_ you,” Iaon said, a bit put out since that was _exactly_ what had been at the back of his mind. But he was also fighting with something strange that he found gripping him about the heart: a growing uncertainty, almost an unease, at seeing expressions on the God’s face in full light and not having to work to see them through shadow. _Unnerving. As if the shadow’s the reality, and what’s seen in daylight isn’t to be trusted…_

“Iaon,” the God said, the grin starting to slide off his face, his expression going concerned. “Iaon, don’t, nothing’s— I’m as always, Iaon. Truly.” And suddenly he was the one who sounded unnerved.

 _That_ couldn’t be permitted. Iaon got a grip on himself, waved a hand. “Yes, of course,” Iaon said. “Of course you are. I’m sorry. This is just—”

“A shock?”

“A little. It’s past. I’m sorry.” But now another concern was coming up. “There’s this, though. I’ve never been to Syene. If I start telling somebody this and I stumble—”

“You won’t. _I’ve_ been there. You can see it as I saw it, Iaon, when I went journeying with my Godfather. Do but step over my ‘threshold’ this evening and I’ll put it in your mind.”

Iaon blinked. “Yes,” he said after a moment, “I guess that would work.” He breathed out. “All right. What do I call him?”

“Where we’re going? Tchesmu.”

The word sounded Egyptian. “And that means?”

 _“Kyoun,”_ the God said in Greek.

Iaon’s jaw dropped; this was simply too much. “ _Oh_ no!” he said. “Bad enough he _looks_ as if someone’s beaten him like a dog—”

“Come now, Iaon. You know that word means more than merely ‘dog’. It’s a _hound_. The great hunter and tracker, the one who sniffs things out…”

Though he was still annoyed, Iaon couldn’t help his mouth quirking up a little, for he’d seen the God actually act the hound at crime scenes—fling himself down on the ground, nose in the dirt, scrambling around on hands and knees until he’d found what he was looking for, and totally uncaring of what anybody who was watching might think of him. “Well,” he said. “As long as you try to avoid actually doing the _sniffing_ thing and attracting attention to yourself…”

“Whatever my master requires,” said the God, and went rummaging on the counter for the honey.

Iaon shook his head. _“That,”_ he said, “is going to take even more getting used to than seeing you. Or seeing you looking like this.” He let his eyes rest for a few moments on the stranger drinking out of the God’s tea mug. “Where’s your shadow gone, then?”

“It’s underneath,” the God said. “Hidden or on view, if I’m not in the Chamber, it’s about me.”

Iaon stepped toward him. “Can I…”

“My Prince,” and now the voice—still the God’s own—was laughing at him a little. “When we’re out you’re going to have to be comfortable touching me as a master normally touches his slave. But in our own House, surely you needn’t ask whether it’s all right.” He reached out a hand.

Iaon took it, held it a moment, feeling it, the strangeness of it. It was a smaller hand than the God’s, thicker; he could feel a place where the middle bone of the index finger had been broken. Then he ran his hand up the strong arm, moving around a little to the side to look at the scars.

Gently he stroked over them, feeling the ridges of the scarring, shivering once at it. “Do you feel them?”

“As a tightness, yes. Nothing like as bad as the way yours feels when the weather’s bad.”

Shoulders shifted under his touch: Iaon felt muscle slide over the shoulderblades, different muscle than he intimately knew from stroking it with his hands most nights, or feeling it pressed against his chest. He shook his head. “This is a lot of trouble to have gone to.”

“Verisimilitude counts, my Iaon. Mortals and immortals alike tend to stop seeking more truth when presented with a good enough mockup of it. And this semblance’s truth goes to the bone: I built its story as I built its image. Wearing this I’ll blend right in, and no one will give me a second look. If I get hungry, perish the thought, its stomach will growl. Wound it and it’ll bleed exactly as I ought to do.”

The God bleeding for any reason whatsoever wasn’t a prospect Iaon cared to linger over. Still, this was undeniably fascinating. “So it’s not really _just_ like wearing clothes,” Iaon said. “The clothes are wearing _you_ , a little.“

The God’s glance at him felt a little surprised—as if that wasn’t a conclusion he’d expected Iaon to reach, and this somehow concerned him. “Mmm. But the semblance has other purposes. Since it perfectly mimics human flesh, inside it my godhead can’t be sensed.”

Iaon blinked at that. “Seriously?”

The God laughed. “No more than your soul can, by other mortals anyway. Flesh and blood are bound to the Earth they were made from, the merely physical elements. They long to contain spirit, they yearn toward it, hoping to gain even a little of its power.” He shook his head, amused at the absurdity of the idea. “But they can’t; spirit’s born of elements far more exalted and subtle. This makes mere flesh and blood jealous of what they contain, so when they enwrap the soul, they make it so it can’t be felt. Why do you think mortals have so much trouble getting along? Imagine a world where that wasn’t so, where you could each feel what others felt, unhampered.” He paused, then grimaced and shook his head, finishing the tea and putting the mug aside. “On second thought, don’t. Imagine a world full of human souls that could actually _hear_ one another. We have enough to keep us busy as it is.”

Iaon blinked. If he’d been a lot younger he might have thought that hearing other human souls directly would be a good thing. But the army had shown him enough of what lay hidden in some other men’s depths to put him off that idea, and since he’d been with the God, that early impression had been forcefully confirmed. There was still something funny about this, though, for the two of _them_ anyway. “Dear God of mine,” Iaon said, “am I actually hearing you suggest that there might possibly be such a thing as _too many murders?”_ And he gave the God a fake-astonished look.

“There are already far too many, my Prince,” the God drawled. “And of those, far too few of them _interesting_.”

“Ah, well, when you put it like that.” Iaon smiled. “And as for my backstory... Sentiment, hmm?”

“Like enough the face I was planning for you was in my mind when I built that story,” said the God. “Like yours, the kindness is written there. It’s folly to try to cover up something that will show through regardless. And which will incidentally make it easier for us to get over that threshold.”

Iaon’s smile went gentler at the compliment, though the tactical addendum amused him. “All right. When do I get mine?”

“Now’s as good a time as any,” said the God, turning toward the hall. “Let me get this off and put it away. When you’ve finished your tea, I’ll meet you in the annex.”

***

It was surprising how much of a relief it was to see the God in his proper veiling of shadows again when Iaon stepped once more through that insubstantial wall and into the anteroom of the God’s Palace of Mind. He was kneeling again, looking with great concentration at the pool of darkness, as if studying some reflection only he could see there.

Iaon went and knelt down beside him, gazing into that darkness as well, unable to help being fascinated by it. “You wouldn’t think,” he said, “that something so shapeless could make something as detailed as….” He tilted his head back toward the portal, back toward the Chamber. The door to the God’s wardrobe had been open as Iaon had passed, and he’d half-glimpsed the finished semblance hanging up in there on one of the strangely-shaped hangers the God used for his clothes.

“The detail isn’t hard. It’s all in here,” the God said, lifting a finger to tap his forehead. “But getting it out, enforcing form on the unformed… It’s work. Worthwhile, though.”

“Right,” Iaon said. “So, my turn now. What will I look like? Can I be taller?”

When the God answered, there was concern in his voice. "Iaon, there’s not nearly enough time to teach you to manage a whole-body semblance before we go. And you need to be physically as much at your ease as you can on this journey. Distracting you from moving normally could be a risk..."

“Well, some other time then, yeah? Because I’ve really always wanted to know how that feels.”

The God was regarding him with some bemusement. “My Prince,” he said, “you don’t need to be any taller. You tower over other mortals as it is.”

“Not where _they_ can see,” Iaon said, and then became aware of how petulant he must sound.

“Idiots,” the God said, “who see, merely, and don’t observe.” Nonetheless he chuckled. “I promise you, some other time you’ll be taller than me—”

Iaon laughed, even as he looked down into that ebon pool and a little shiver went down his back. “Going to hold you to that, my God.”

“Very well. But for this case, we need to keep things simple. Just a new face for you, Iaon. My own everyday appearance is now a matter of public record. But yours, because you’ve been at pains to keep it so, is unknown. That works to our benefit here.” He tilted his head a bit, then tilted it the other way, examining Iaon’s face as an artist might survey his raw materials before beginning work.

The God reached down into that pool, came up with a handful of darkness, and then dipped the fingers of his other hand into it as he studied Iaon’s face. “All right,” he said. “Close your eyes.”

Iaon did, but again couldn’t restrain a shiver. And then he jumped a little as he felt the God’s fingers touch his face, and on them was… nothing. No sense of heat or cold, of wet or dry. He couldn’t even really feel the warmth of the God’s fingers. “That is _so odd,”_ he said.

“Yes,” the God murmured, sounding a bit distracted as he started applying the ylem. “So I found it the first few times, a long while ago. Now…”

He trailed off. Iaon held still a while more, feeling the God’s fingers stroking his face, not in anything like the normal way—unpredictable, gently impulsive—but with a strange systematic thoroughness, as if tracing the lines of a drawing. “I gather this isn’t something you’d feel comfortable about doing on the road,” he said at last.

“Oh no,” the God said, and smiled… and the feel of that smile in Iaon’s mind, even with his eyes closed, brought the hair up on the back of his neck. “There are too many things in the world in flux, my Prince; too many things uncertain about their own shapes, their own states. Ylem… does not do well in conjunction with uncertainty. Without the constraints emplaced about it by my Palace of Mind, should the raw ylem prove more certain about its own structure than what it comes in contact with, the other part of the equation would fare… rather badly.”

Iaon shivered again—just once, but all over, and hard.

“Yes,” the God said. “Fortunately, as regards certainty, I’m more than adequately equipped. Now turn your head, Iaon, and hold still. No, the other way.”

“How many ways are there to hold still?” Iaon said, trying not to laugh.

The God made an amused sound at the back of his throat. “Count them, find one that you like, and employ it.”

Iaon smiled, then let his face relax and worked on holding still.

A few more moments of silence passed. “I’m going to add perhaps fifteen years to you,” the God said. “Enough to make you look quite senior in your business, but not enough to bring up questions of why you haven’t retired and let your sons start doing the heavy lifting.”

Iaon nodded. _Sons_ , he thought. There was another subject that hadn’t so much as crossed his mind for weeks now. _But the man who’s fostering them’s their real father now: and glad enough to have royal blood in his house, because who knows? They might be kings some day._ He thought of his teenage roll in the hay with lovely Actaia, she of the sweet smile and the big dark eyes and the soft dark laugh, and remembered his mother mentioning in passing years back that a traveler to the City from Amilos to the north had seen Actaia and her twin sons there—handsome fair-haired boys who were starting to get tall. “Like your sister,” the Queen had said. _…And now they’ll be of an age to be called in and legitimised, whether or not Father gets better. Because after Arêtë, who rules the Kingdom then?_

Iaon sighed.It all seemed so far away, these days. Except for one bit. _Father…_

And suddenly Iaon wanted to get up and run out to the sitting room and the little dark glass window and try to see how his father was doing. But this of course was folly. _Too soon,_ he thought, _even when it’s Aesculapius himself whose remedy’s in play. Now comes the hard part. The waiting…_

“I’m guessing your father will do better than your expectations, my Prince,” the God said.

Iaon smiled. “Reading my heart?”

“When I promised I wouldn’t?” said the God, briefly amused. “But there’s no need. Your sons, their mother, your sister, your father… Even if I couldn’t merely deduce it, the flow of your thought shows in your face. Neither gods or mortals would believe how much they give away of their so-called secret thought, moment by moment...”

He fell silent and didn’t speak for some breaths more. Presently the God’s fingers left Iaon’s face and stroked backwards over his head, over his hair, down to the nape of his neck. “Now then,” the God said. “I’ll put this on you tomorrow before we go. But should there be need for you to remove it suddenly, feel here.” The cool hand took one of his, settled it at Iaon’s nape. “Think of the disguise as a sort of hood. Grasp here with your fingers—where the spine meets the skull: feel the little tag there, like a bit of flesh? Then just pull over and forward. It’ll all come away.”

Iaon felt for it; a rough bit like a scab that was getting ready to peel off. “Found it.”

“All right. Open your eyes now.”

They opened exactly as always. The God looked at him and was very still. “Come,” he said, “let’s look at you in the mirror.”

The God led the way out to the bathroom, switching the lights on. Iaon looked into that perfect, unforgiving mirror, and sucked in a quick breath.

 _“Gods_ I look like my father,” Iaon said in wonder, meeting the God’s eyes. “It’s amazing!” His hair was thinner, the silver had almost replaced the gold. And his face…

 _This is absolutely what I’ll look like when I’m getting ready to turn sixty,_ Iaon thought, _supposing the Fates spare me so long._ It was a thinner face, a sharper one. The lines already familiar to him were much more pronounced. The eyes too lay deeper-sunk in their sockets, the bags under them were now not just a hint but a definite statement, and his forehead was far more furrowed. But the laugh lines around Iaon’s eyes were deep in a way that made him feel irrationally more cheerful, and his eyes seemed both friendlier and more fierce, even if the blue of them was paler now. _Maybe it’s all the silver in the hair._ “That’s absolutely fantastic,” Iaon said, grinning, and the older man in the mirror simply came alive, grinning back at him, dangerous-looking for all his age.

The God had given Iaon’s face only one long look and had immediately cleared his throat and dropped his gaze to Iaon’s arms. “Adequate,” he said. “Though a few alterations would be wise, to match you more closely to the predominant Argive type. Darker hair, and different eyes, in a less uncommon colour. Now as for these…”

“More ylem?”

“What?” The God shook his head. “No. I’ll take no chance of making your hands feel strange to you.” The God took Iaon’s hands in his, gazing down at them with something of the same concentration he’d bent on the dark pool of ylem. “These I can do with ink; tomorrow morning after you shower. For so short a visit, matching the shade of murex stain is no challenge for a competent chemist. Then some age spots, a little ‘sun damage’… Simple.”

Iaon was still gazing at the old, crafty-looking, cantankerous-looking man in the mirror. _I don’t just look like my father. I look like Granddad._ And that was a good thought, for no one had meddled with Ismenos Ladonidês without bitterly regretting it. “Pull it off now, Iaon,” the God said.

The little tag took a bit more finding this time. “It settles in, doesn’t it,” he said.

“Yes. Found it?”

Iaon nodded, closed his eyes, pulled. A moment later he opened his eyes again and found himself holding an older man’s face in his hands. He blinked and turned the empty eyes away from him, then held the now-still mask out for the God. “Keep this for me till the morning?”

“Of course.” The God took it, headed back into the Chamber. “So, beyond doing your arms… all that’s left now is the packing.”

“For a two days’ walk?” Iaon said, following him in. “Won’t take us long. And even though we need to look like we’ve been on the road much longer than that, traveling light’s still best. Because why look like we have a lot to steal?”

The list of things to do was already starting to put itself together in his head. “We go armed, of course, but not with anything that’s going to attract undue attention. My sword…” Iaon bit his lip briefly, sitting down on their couch. “Should be enough. Anybody who hears me talk will know where I come from within three guesses, and any Greek his age—” he tilted his chin at the face that the God was putting away a shelf in his wardrobe— “is like enough to have kept this kind of sword from his military service. For you…” Iaon glanced at the God’s semblance on its hanger. “A knife wouldn’t go amiss. The kind of thing a man might give a slave: functional, but not so valuable that in a moment of weakness he’d be tempted to ‘lose’ it in exchange for cash. Something beat up, but good and sharp.”

“The Thalastrae keep an informal armoury of various weapons I might need for purposes of disguise,” the God said, shutting the wardrobe. “Have them show you a selection in the morning.”

Iaon nodded. “And as for food… Just bread and oil, the simple stuff travellers would carry. A skin of something resinated, well watered down since there’s no counting on clean water on the road. But that’s all. We’ll be on well travelled roads; we’d be expecting to eat on the way.”

“Westie will drop us near one of the small towns south of Memphis,” the God said, sitting down by him. “A bite there and we’ll be off.”

There was a lift to the God’s voice that caught Iaon’s attention. “You’re actually getting _excited_ about this,” Iaon said.

“What? Certainly not. Just another case.”

Iaon wasn’t fooled for a moment: the God didn’t take such pains as he’d been taking over “just another case.” For whatever reasons, more than usual was riding on this one. “But the conditions are a little different this time, aren’t they, my God? Not even the Shadowcloak with us on this trip. A little more risk than even _you’ve_ been used to of late.” He grinned, because as he considered it, the extra sense of excitement was starting to tingle down his nerves as well. “The open road, no telling for sure what’ll happen on the way, and something that could be dangerous waiting at the far end…”

In the darkness of the Chamber, there in the hazy starlight, the God had done away with his shadow. Now the unveiled face turned toward Iaon, and the eyes catching that starlight might be trying to look casual, even bored… but they were failing. “Out there, as in here,” he said with a slow small smile, “just the two of us against the world, my Iaon.”

Iaon reached out to him, matching the God’s smile with his own. “Come here, you,” he said, “and let’s tire each other out. The sooner we’re asleep, the sooner it’ll be morning.”

***

The Khemish town outside which West Wind dropped them around mid-morning was a little place called Dashur. It was barely a quarter the size of Iaon's small City, but busy enough for all that, sitting right on the western shore of a broad bend of the Nile and embraced by docks on both sides. One dock was nearly hidden by fishing boats, some with their slant-rigged sails up and just heading out, some with their gear already put away as they finished unloading the catch from that morning. The other pier had only a couple of boats docked: low-decked vessels suitable for various kinds of casual work up and down a river, both as ferries and cargo carriers. Between the two docks was a low scatter of whitewashed, cubelike houses, some with extra cubes piled on top, and most of them featuring canopies or other casual sunshades on the roofs.

The shorter and darker and older-seeming of the two men standing there was looking down northeastward across the roofs of the little town with a small pinched frown deepening above his nose. He was dressed in that far-from-home-but-not-admitting-it way that a lot of Greeks adopted when away from what they considered the civilised world (meaning Greece): a nod to the visited culture (the pleated heavy linen kilt in a middle-of-the-road dusky olive colour that would be slow to show dirt) with a downplayed assertion of where he'd rather be (the familiar comfortable off-white linen-canvas tunic, belted inside the kilt for a change). "A bit strange, this…" he said.

"What, master?"

"Houses, apartment buildings, markets, warehousing, everything else you'd expect… But not a whole lot in the way of temples. Unless you see something I don't?"

The being standing next to him, who _always_ saw something Iaon didn't, though he wasn't going to rub that in just now-chuckled softly: not in a God's voice any more, for now that they were far from home the game was on, and disguises were fully in place. "Master Eperitos…" he said. For that was the name Iaon had chosen to use on the road, and the sooner he got used to hearing it the better.

"Mmm?"

The Consulting God gave himself the first of what would doubtless be many reminders that a slave did not give his master orders or speak in too declarative a way even when just making suggestions. "If you'd just look over there…"

Iaon looked. There, in a long line running north to south, were as many temples as anyone could have asked for, in little clumps and clusters, strung out like beads on a string at the feet of a long bare hill of sand easily fifty stadia long. Some of them were mere horizontal brick-built whitewashed blocks or cubes dumped into the sand like a child's playthings. Some of them were early versions of the pyramids they'd seen at a distance the day before, mounds or slant-sided platforms or slumped truncated cones, also built in brick and a little worn-looking from two thousand years' erosion by wind and sand and the use of the wrong equations to calculate the most effective angles for their sides. The God couldn't find it in himself to scorn them: even for a God some experiments took a long time to run. That mortals had attempted these with nothing but their own lifespans to work with was to their credit rather than their blame.

Seeing them, Iaon laughed softly at himself. "All right," he said. "Always good to know we're well provided for if I start having some kind of religious crisis. Not that I'm _planning_ to have one." And he gave the tall brawny scarred man standing beside him an amused sidelong look. "Besides the one I live with already. That too heavy for you?"

"Not at all, master," the God said, shrugging his shoulders a little to settle the weight he was carrying. He'd spent their last hour or so at home this morning doing strings of increasingly involved quadratic equations to determine the most effective arrangement of the straps for the cleverly compartmented backpack he'd devised, while at the same time repeatedly convincing Mrs. Hudson that they did _not_ need to completely fill the backpack with food. _It's_ civilisation _, Mrs. Hudson, not_ ours _of course but one of the oldest ones in the world regardless, and we'll be walking right through the beating heart of it along the Earth's single most heavily travelled waterway, and at no point will we be further from a five-course meal than a two hours' walk, so if you would_ please- But it had all been for nothing, so that besides their bedrolls and changes of clothes for each of them, and various other necessities of the road, the God was now also carrying stuffed pitas and scones and meat and cheese and oil and amphoriskae of wine and the Thalastrae only knew what else. (They had started invisibly subtracting items from the packing as quickly as Mrs. Hudson put them in, and acute as her own brand of observation could sometimes be, not even Mrs. Hudson could keep track of all the Thalastrae at once—)

"There may be something to what you were saying before," said "Master Eperitos" with a smile.

"What?"

"About how what you're thinking about shows in your face."

The God's eyes widened. "Ia— _Master!"_ And he frowned. "No need to be insulting."

"You want to watch that," Iaon said, glancing around him from the height where they stood. "Been a while since you've worn one of these, maybe?-and you've got out of the habit of keeping everything quite so tightly under wraps?"

While the two propositions weren't directly causally connected, the God had to admit that Iaon might have something there. He schooled the semblance's face into impassivity and turned it toward "Eperitos" again.

"Better," Iaon said, turning to gaze down the river side of the slope. "Path over there, I think. Yes, you can see how the scrub's all eaten down, the goatherds bring their stock this way. Let's go. Mind the gravel; it's steep here. You don't want to put a foot wrong and start sliding before you get the hang of handling all that weight in back."

And he was off, striding down the hillside and then down the little rutted path toward town as if he owned them both, using the stout walking-stick the God had given him not to lean on, but to thump into the ground a little with every other pace, as if reminding the earth where it was supposed to be. _As he used to do with his spear once upon a time,_ the God thought as he made his way after Iaon, being careful how he stepped: his Prince had been quite right about the way the burden altered one's centre of gravity.

The path switched back across the hillside a couple of times before taking them down to the river's level and into the outskirts of the town, a scatter of mean little mudbrick houses and manufactories where one or two tanners were located, out at the fringes of everything as always and on the side that would keep them out of the prevailing southerly wind. The stink of them made the God's nose twitch as they went by. In passing, Iaon glanced at some patterned skins stretched over withy frames leaned up against the front wall of one work shed: cowhide, oryx hide, zebra. "Something of interest, master?"

"More like the lack of it," Iaon said. "No lionskin. Too many people here, too busy: the lions have been driven out. Just as well. Wouldn't much care to meet one by ourselves in the middle of the night."

"Perhaps, master," the God said, "it simply means there've been no lions here _recently."_ Because it was important to keep Iaon precise in his thinking processes.

Iaon smiled, shook his head as they walked on. "There hasn't been a lion here in the time it would take one's hide to completely go to rags and tatters in this heat and wind. Because if they _had_ a lion's skin, they'd show it."

"Sentiment, master?"

"Pride," Iaon said, "or advertising. Take your pick."

The God sighed. _There's always something…_ Then he got distracted, because the houses were coming closer together: there were doorways and windows to look into, secrets to learn. And the street around them—it was a street now, not just a dirt passageway between buildings—was starting to fill with people as they made their way down it, just a few at first and then more and more; men and women and running, shouting children, everyone kilted or shifted in white or light-coloured linen, their arms full of goods or shopping, hurrying about their business, talking, arguing, scolding, laughing.

And then they were into the town proper, into the central market place, and the sights and scents swirled around the God like water-the hot bright colours, the sun on everything, bolts of fabric laid out, animal carcases hanging on hooks, smells of cooking, sharp, dark, hot, spicy; and the people, the _people!_ Heart-reading was difficult due to the combination of the newness of the semblance with the number of potential subjects. But regardless, for one who could _observe_ there were still so many stories, all densely layered but all laid out plain to see, hopes and fears and longings, frustration and desire, anguish hidden in the way a kilt was folded, rage in the way the plaits in a wig were misbraided or someone's eye-kohl was misapplied. And the ways bodies moved and held themselves were so interestingly different here, all deliciously _offset_ a little bit, so that the God would think he knew what was going on with someone and then realise that arms folded in such a way might mean secretive intent in Greece, but certainly couldn't _here_ because there were other mitigating culturally-shared tells to help him course-correct, after all just look at the turnups of the man's _sleeves—_

Iaon had paused to look over a fruitseller's stall, seriously considering the pomegranates and figs as if for all the world there wasn't already half a talent's weight of food in their pack. He was pointing and saying "What are those?" and the seller (Greek-speaking as a lot of traders would be in a Nile town) was saying in a hoarse croak, "Date plums, first ones of the season, just in…" and as he spoke the God saw it _all_ : the man's weakness on one side, the way his mouth was crooked but he was leaning a bit to the _other_ side and the hip was cocked strangely unless you understood that he was compensating, yes, just the way he leaned against his side of the stall's table that held up the woven fruit baskets, "…pity about your sister, of course, but of course it's commendable that you're so intent on keeping food on the table for her children after you took them in. You're up and about sooner than expected, doubtless it's all this fruit in your diet that helped you heal up so quickly after the crocodile that did for her took a bite out of you while you were trying to pull her out of its jaws. And whatever you do, _don't_ let the local priests make you think it's just because you had some god on your side. Though unfortunately stubborn determination isn't everything, it does leave one with blind spots, like your shop boy there, look at those sandals, his kilt may say 'hard-working threadbare honesty' but no matter _how_ much mud he's painted onto them his _shoes_ say 'I've been skimming off the daily take', oh at _least_ three copper _deben_ a day, otherwise how ever would he—"

The staring fruit-seller's boy dodged out without warning from behind the stall and legged it across the marketplace and out of sight. The fruit-seller gaped wider than he'd already been doing for some moments. And the God's eyes flew open wide as Iaon cuffed him upside the head in a most disciplinary way. "Tchesmu, _quiet!_ And when you speak next, mind your tongue. Sorry," Iaon said to the fruit-seller, "he picked up a lot of bad habits from the last master, man just let him run on all day and then beat him within an inch of his life when his temper gave out. A little bit understandable but not the right way to treat these silly ones. You know how it is, the Gods leave some people short on wits but then turn right around and give them something else to compensate, and it's up to us to cope…"

"It's all right, I know I what you mean," said the fruit-seller, "you take my wife's sister's youngest, now—"

The God opened his mouth. Iaon lifted one annoyed index finger and shot him a sideways look. _"Ah—!"_

The God closed his mouth and a peculiar shiver ran down his back. Iaon turned back to the fruit-seller. "Sorry, you were saying?"

While he went through his tally sticks for the last few days, the fruit-seller started telling Iaon just what the God had been _about_ to tell him, about the prophetic gift that ran in his family, niece up with the priests of Anubis now learning her pictures and only six years old… The God stood there and sulked, and Iaon paid him no mind at all. And when they walked away from the fruit stall at last with a little woven-rush sack of half as many date plums again as Iaon had paid for, with the fruit-seller calling down far-seeing Horus's blessing on Iaon's "poor mad lad", it was almost more than the God could bear.

"You were _enjoying_ that. … _Master,"_ the God added, as if it was completely an afterthought. But in fact he was preoccupied with having to command parts of him, or parts of the semblance, or possibly both, to keep still. _Probably to do with running the semblance in, it'll pass, but_ surely _I didn't build in anything to do with Tchesmu getting to_ like _what his previous master was doing to him, where would_ that _have come from, sweet Heaven don't let this be like the Lady Xanthe again, it would be completely—_

"Oh yes," Iaon said. "Absolutely."

"I didn't even get a chance to tell him about—"

"Something he probably didn't need to hear on top of finding out his brother-in-law's kid is a thief, yes! _Exactly._ When you're called in to help people sort out what's wrong with their lives, a crime, a theft, that's one thing, you have a contract, go right ahead and tell everybody what you see. But when you _don't_ have that, you can't just _do_ that to people, m— Tchesmu! Sooner or later you're going to overstep and _really_ offend somebody, and then they're going to backhand you and give me lip for not disciplining my slave, and then I'm going to have to take them apart. Which would be bad for the business we're on, mmm?"

"Tchesmu" grunted and looked away scowling as they walked out of the market and into the street on its far side that led toward the river. He was have enough trouble dealing with the warm rush of interest the semblance was showing at the prospect of watching Iaon take someone apart.

"And if you start doing that when we get you-know-where, I'll bet you _anything_ somebody's going to twig. Which would be very bad. So get it out of your system _now,_ right?"

He was right, of course, but there was no way the God was going to admit as much in the clear. "Yes, master."

"Good. Now come on, have a date plum, they're really nice."

"Not hungry," the God said. "Master." Even though his mouth was watering; the one Iaon was eating smelled delicious. Was that the semblance again? Or was it something to do with this "food-in-the-open-air" thing that Iaon had started babbling about last night?

"And also tell me how you did that," Iaon said as they made their way out between the two papyrus-painted pillars that marked the end of the town and the entrance to the royal highway, "because _that_ was absolutely amazing."

 _Oh well…_ And finally the God smiled a little, because there was no point in trying to sulk while Iaon was praising him. "Don't tell me you didn't see the amulet he was wearing under his tunic? Old. Polished by constant rubbing from someone who liked it a lot because it was a gift a beloved older brother got her when she was little. He wears it to remember her by…"

And somehow halfway through the explanation about the amulet and the crocodile and the fruit-seller's stroke and entirely the _wrong_ mud on the stall-boy's sandals, the God found he was holding the little plaited-rush bag as he ate one of the date plums, and it really _was_ very nice, rich and soft and honey-sweet. And the buildings and the voices fell away behind them, and shortly they were walking along the ancient paved road that ran northward along the left bank of the river, and birds sang and the southerly wind, gentle in their faces, blew and rattled the fronds of the palms planted to either side of the road. Rising light glanced off the water, and clouds slid across it, dulling it to shadowy iron and then passing to leave it shimmering like beaten silver again: and Iaon was laughing, the best sound in the world, the sound no semblance could hide.

"So," Iaon was saying. "No more deducing out loud unless we're out of everybody's earshot, all right?"

"All right," the God said, and was hard put to make it come out as a grumble. "But seriously, my master. 'Silly'??"

"Always the word we used to use at home for someone who had a little more God in them than was good for a mortal…"

"Then you've been silly more than once, I'd say."

Iaon tried to suppress the giggle, with very poor results. "All right, stop hogging those plums, give me a couple now."

The God stared in some discomfiture at the little empty rush bag in his hands. "Ah…"

"You ate them _all?"_

"Hardly _all_ , my master. You had at least four."

"Out of maybe a dozen!"

"And aren't you always nagging me about eating more fruit?"

The little dark man beside him passed his hand over his eyes and shook his head. "Tchesmu," he said.

"And now all of a sudden I'm wrong for doing what you tell me?"

"Tchesmu…"

"Seriously, what kind of slave doesn't obey his master?"

_"Tchesmu!"_

"Master?"

"Shut up and _walk."_

***

And they walked.

And walked, and _walked._

This was the part the God had been dreading: the road between towns, the empty country. He'd been sure this was going to be a trial beyond all trials. Yet it turned out not to be so. As he heaved his first big sigh and stared around him, ready to begin a complaint about the dreadful tedium of actually having to spend _time_ getting somewhere, he expected Iaon to tell him to be quiet and cope. But that wasn't the response he got.

"Yes," Iaon said, and heaved one of those sighs himself.

"What?" the God said, looking over at him.

"Eperitos" was walking with his head tilted a little back, his nostrils flaring as he scented the morning; and he was smiling. _Strange,_ the God thought, _how even through the semblance it's still his smile. The way the muscles work…_

"Air's different," Iaon said.

"We're hundreds of miles from home, master," the God couldn't resist saying. "The odds of it being the _same_ would seem fairly low…"

"But smell _how_ it's different," Iaon said. "River water. Trees. That kind of spicy smell," he said, tilting his head back again as they walked, "you get that? Tamarisk."

"Is that what that is." The God classified the scent, filed it away.

"But there's something else too. Not flowers, this time of year, it's a bit too late." Iaon pointed toward the river's edge, toward a long band of tall waving green that followed the curve of the water right up northward and out of sight in beds that varied from cubits wide to stadia, depending on how thick the underlying silt was. "Papyrus…"

"It's everywhere," the God murmured. He was used to dealing with it processed: he had never seen it green and growing.

"Saw it the first time when the Myceneans came in on the Athenian side after that disagreement about Thebes," Iaon said. "Maybe two years before I was invalided out. The Thebans—" And he was off, talking through the politics of yet another dreadful extra-Peloponnese military adventure, something that normally would have bored the God rigid: except it was Iaon talking about it, and Iaon had been in it. And after that they wound up talking about the local food, and people's clothing fashions and whether they had anything to do with the economy, and the shape of the carts that passed them by and whether the ones in Greece were better, and a hundred other things, just as they would have at home by their fire: taking apart everything they saw for the sheer interest of it, the wonders and the commonplaces, little things and big.

The God found himself actually beginning to wonder whether perhaps they shouldn't do this more often. For even when the talk would run down eventually, they would just fall into a steady stride together, an easy march the rhythm of which never broke, the route-march that Iaon would have been familiar with from a hundred such in his army days. At such times, though the God had half feared the steady rhythm and speed would be near-hypnotic, he saw that Iaon's attention and alertness never faltered. He was always looking about him calmly but with a strategist's eye, reading the road ahead of them, assessing the travelers they passed, the places where someone might hide to ambush a passer-by. Speaking or silent, Iaon was ready, and the God would be kept safe, as safe as if they were in the House with its doors shut against the world.

And not long after that the thought crept across the God's mind: home had become more than the House, now. Home was where Iaon was.

He let out a breath at the rightness of that and allowed his attention to fall back into the place it needed to be, for now: thinking about the case. This one had been causing him more concern than usual. Indeed, every time he thought of _not_ solving this case, _not_ having it be an absolute triumph, his stomach went cold. Such a reaction was most unusual for him. The God couldn't explain it, even to himself, and hoped continually that Iaon wasn't going to notice how affected he was and ask him for an explanation… because he wouldn't be able to give him one that was both true and would hold water.

When the God had first gone looking for some cold case, _any_ cold case, to occupy his attention on that awful day when he wasn't going to be able to be in his own House, he hadn't really cared what he might turn up. It was sheer accident that as he'd gone through the copies of his notes that he kept in his Palace of Mind, he came across one set that hadn't been complete. It was annoyance at the incompletion more than anything else that sent him looking for the tablet holding his thoughts, fragmentary as they had been, on the Danaïd case. When he held it in his hands again, when Iaon found it—of _course_ it would be Iaon who found it—all his senses had twinged at once with the strange but imperative feeling that this case was somehow vital: that solving it at this particular moment in time was _important_. That there was some imperative event, or sequence of events, that its solution would trigger. As a result, every time dawn came up, or dusk fell, without him being closer to a solution, the God started to feel nervous. And infuriatingly, he couldn't even tell _why_. The God hated such data, not rationally derived, but he didn't dare ignore it.

_Maybe this walking is a good thing. More time to think. Some fresh stimuli around. And Iaon is happy. That light he conducts never flows as freely through him as when he's glad._

There was this, too, a side effect of the new location and the unusual circumstances that required them to be disguised: Iaon wasn't picking up on the God's interior reactions quite as acutely as he normally did. _That,_ the God thought, _comes of this cursed semblance._ It was the only thing good about it, a backhanded advantage that was keeping Iaon from feeling the God's nervousness. _Just as well. He'd worry._ Whereas the truth was that the God was already doing enough worrying for the both of them.

Something snapped him out of this line of thought, something small: a change in the way "Eperitos's" bronze-shod walking stick was striking the ground, something a touch more martial and emphatic. It was a signal. Iaon's gait hadn't changed or his pace picked up, but as the God came back to himself he saw how his gaze rested on three men ahead of them, coming toward them on the road. They were kilted and tunicked, and had sacks over their backs, and also carried walking sticks—thick, heavy ones, halfway to cudgels. "You with me, Tchesmu?" said "Eperitos", his head up, his shoulders back.

"I'm here, master," the God murmured as the men walked closer.

The God watched as they came, saw their eyes flicker over "Eperitos," assessing: then watched as their eyes flicked to the (larger, brawnier, very alert and scowling) Tchesmu behind him. He saw (and inwardly faintly heard) the men doing a sort of quick mental sum in their heads. _Might have something worth taking, then again, two of them, three of us, little one's got a sword and maybe could use it, slave looks nasty, maybe not…_

They moved a little to one side, passed by, aware of the hardness of Iaon's eyes on them even as in passing he nodded amiably. The God went swiftly from scorn at their inability to instantly see Iaon for the skilled warrior he was, to annoyance that Iaon must suffer the attention of such fools, to faint angry disappointment that there was no excuse for him and Iaon to take them on one after another and so deal with them that they would never make such a mistake about a man of Iaon's stature again.

But Iaon just sighed. "Still not taller," he murmured, "or they'd never have thought even that hard about it…" He shrugged, smiled half a smile, changed his walking-stick from his left hand to his right, and strode on.

The God looked at him with some bemusement. How was it that his Prince didn't see how much bigger he was than his body? Mere physical height didn't come into it. "Master," he said, "mere height isn't something _you_ need aspire to. Tallness is common. Perfection is rare... and even more enjoyable in compact form."

"Tallness is _not_ common," Iaon said. "Not the way _you_ wear it."

"We're not talking about me," said the God, "we're talking about you."

Iaon laughed. "There's a change," he said. But he was teasing. "I meant to ask you about these, though." He lifted up his walking stick, twirled it effortlessly up into the shoulder-arms position of a man used to walking long distances with a spear laid over his shoulder, and looked down at it, stroking his free hand up and down its length. "Beautiful finish on this," he said, stroking the satiny sheen of the blond wood. "On yours too. But you didn't send out for these—there wasn't time. You made them."

The God blushed, he wasn't sure why. "Well, I had help. There's all manner of timber down in the House's firewood storage. Holm-oak for you: the kind you like in our fire. Yew for me. One of the Thalastrae did the lathe work. Then my shadows helped me with the finishing." He admired the darker wood of his own stick; its lustre in sunlight was unexpectedly pleasing. "They're in these, a little. With that you'll always have an easier time finding your way in the dark."

"Perfect length for stickfighting, too," Iaon said.

"Two-thirds your height is the rule of thumb…"

Iaon nodded. "Look behind," he said. "They still in the road?"

The God glanced over his shoulder. "Yes. Going the other way. But I'd have felt them change their minds."

"All right," Iaon said. "Another hour or so and we'll take a break."

The sun rose higher. The God fell back into his cogitations as Iaon set the pace. There would be arrangements to make in Memphis, and for best effect Iaon must not know about them. He would get a text away to Horus tonight while Iaon slept. This case was not important just for the sake of its solution-though that was important enough. That its solution come about in a particular way was also vital for Iaon's sake.

After all, things had been going on with him that he'd hoped to keep from the God. Which was ridiculous, of course. It would have taken a purblind God indeed not to perceive, whether inwardly shared or not, the unease that had fallen over Iaon after his sister's visit, the sense of things being badly unsettled, off kilter. And it was unacceptable for Iaon to be troubled so. The God had been half-looking for something spectacular to do, something outrageous and out of the ordinary, to help Iaon shake off this mood. And all unexpected, as the Danaïd case had started to unfold itself, it became plain that solving it was going to take them to unusual places, out of what passed for a comfort zone for both of them.

No harm in that. The Work was not about comfort. In any case, the God had seen the way clear to what he needed for Iaon to be put to rights: a headier dose of danger than usual. And, if necessary, a bit of a reminder that mortals were messy to deal with, and Olympus (and the God's company) a far better place to be.

There had been times when his own thoughts had turned a little unnerved of late: a little embarrassed, almost ashamed. _As if Iaon doesn't trust you. As if your own Prince would ever leave you. As if he_ could _. The two of you are_ one _, now._ Yet any relationship, Mummy Aphrodite had told him often enough, needed a little shaking up on occasion… an injection of something new. While never entirely forsaking the old, of course, but adding to it, building in a new angle from which it could be viewed…

Now would come the time when this concept would be taken to its logical conclusion. Soon would come the execution of the plan the God hadn't revealed to Iaon, the thing he was about to do that would doubtless make Iaon so angry if he knew about it now—or if it didn't work. But it _was_ going to work. When it actually happened in front of him, Iaon would stare at his God in amazement and delight and would find him more remarkable and brilliant than he ever had before. All these clouds across the face of Iaon's sun would be blown away, and all things would be right again.

And that would make the God very happy indeed… because other things were troubling him.

He had looked into the bathroom mirror with Iaon last night and had found what he'd seen there too difficult to bear for long. His initial workmanship had been far too perfect, and as a result the God had found himself thinking, _Here is the mortal I will someday still love... even as time gnaws at his body while it slides past without touching me._ He swallowed, seeing again what he'd seen then, feeling again the sudden fear he'd felt. _Time gnaws him even now, moment by moment. Today it seems slow. But it will strip the limberness from his joints and the nimbleness from his hands and the strength from his muscles; it will thin his face and steal his hair and cloud his eyes, bow those strong straight shoulders and embrittle his bones. Not all Aesculapius's simples can stop that from happening. And the one thing that_ can _is beyond my reach._

_…For the moment._

He knew the solution: the only question was the timing. Iaon had many good years in him, to judge by his parents. _But the sooner this happens, the better._ A clever God with the long game in mind could eventually bend the will of Heaven to his own: and he was the cleverest God on that whole mountain. He was sure he could force the dolts in power to understand that this mortal was too important to the Work, to the world, to be allowed to grow old and fall into the Shades.

But right now nothing was certain. Their lives were full of danger, accident… _Uncertainty._ The God shivered, or the semblance did, with the discomfort of it. And of a remembered voice that said in the back of his mind, cool, dispassionate: _Caring is not an advantage, little brother._

"Time to stop now," said Iaon out of nowhere. "You've been quiet too long."

"Thinking," said the God.

"If you were home on the sofa I'd let you go on with that. But we've come a good ways in the last few hours. Mealtime now."

The God blinked at him. He could have argued, but it was something of a pleasure to be jarred out of this particular train of thought. And then his stomach growled.

Iaon laughed. "See, you were right."

"I was right?"

"About your semblance making the appropriate noises. Come on, let's take the weight off our feet and have lunch."

"Where then, master?"

Iaon looked around. "Some palm trees over there by the that little bit of grassy ground sticking into the water," he said. "Might have been made for a picnic. And we can cool the wine off in the water and get it fit to drink again."

"Ever the tactician, my master," the God murmured. "As you command."

***

Iaon went digging in that capacious pack with no great certainty about what he might find in there, for Mrs. Hudson had been in full fuss mode this morning. Iaon had stayed well away: he'd long since learned better than to interfere with any woman, immortal or not, when she started worrying about what you'd have to eat on the road. The God, though he might be the smartest being in the room, had not yet learned this simple lesson, and watching him try to manage their household goddess this morning had been funny enough that Iaon had had to shut himself in the Chamber several times to keep his giggling from being heard.

Package after package came out, beautifully wrapped in something like a fine thin brown papyrus. Stuffed pitas, cold meat, fresh fruit: Iaon divided it in half, putting aside that night's supper should they not eat in Ibbis, the next town. _Three_ amphoriskae of wine, two of a deep red, one of a resinated white: and a fourth amphoriska of the House's fresh sweet water. "Plain pitas and oil further down," Iaon said. "Good. Eat the more perishable stuff first." And then he came up with something unexpected, a little cloth bag, and opened it. He reached in, pulled something out; smiled. It was a scone, with currants in it, and it was still warm.

He handed the God the bag. "And also… eat the stuff that would strike someone else as _very strange_ when they went through our things."

"'When'?" the God said, taking the bag and pulling out one of the scones for himself. "So you're expecting that."

"If these people are as crooked as you're trying not to admit you think they might be? Absolutely. They may let us in their house, but the minute they hear my accent they'll be getting ready to have someone search our bag."

The God nodded, having already vanished the scone, and went for one of the pitas. Iaon did so as well, and for a while they sat quiet and ate, the white wine meanwhile hanging in the water by a string Iaon found further down in the pack, the red breathing for a bit, water to mix it with in a couple of small plain redware tumblers. Little brown birds alighted on the short turf under the trees to look at them curiously and then bounce close for crumbs: small silvery fish darted between the bulrushes sticking up stiff and emerald-green out of the water. A blue heron sailed over and came down in the reeds just out of view, rustled around a little and then stood very still on thin reedy legs and waited for the fish to forget it was there. Under the trees, the breeze was cool.

The God ate a second pita and looked out across the water for a while, then sighed. "I could nap..."

"Unwise," Iaon said. "You'd expect your muscles to relax, but they won't. They'll tighten. You sore yet?"

"No."

"You will be by tonight, a bit," Iaon said. "We'll take this hour's rest here, no more. Then off down the road with us. We'll pass through Ibbis a while before sunset, pick up a hot snack, then out the other side of town. Find ourselves somewhere to bivouac a few stadia further north when it gets dark."

"The old campaigner," the God said, genially mocking.

"Not the kind of thing you forget," Iaon said.

They pulled up the white wine from the cool river water and drank it between them. Iaon filled the empty amphoriska with river water, stoppered it up and flung it far out into the water. The papery wrappings he crumpled up to put in some evening fire they passed in Ibbis. The God went off to tend to physical necessities: soon afterwards, so did Iaon. When he came back everything was packed and Tchesmu was shouldering the pack. Iaon looked over their picnic site to make sure nothing had been forgotten. "Ready?"

"Yes, my master."

"Slow march at first, then, or you'll upset your stomach."

And so for the next while they ambled, taking it easy as the light began slanting with early afternoon. After an hour or so Iaon quickened the pace, leaving the God to the silence of his thoughts, which he slipped into readily.

For his own part, Iaon was enjoying the relative quiet of the road and the scents on the air: the spice of persea-tree and the dark smoky scent of desert sycamore and the faint sweet-sharp aroma of jujube, and the more familiar aromas of wild pomegranate and fig growing in the orchards and homesteads they passed. Then every now and then along would come the livestock scents of herds of broad-browed white cattle with a drover or two, so that you had to watch your step for a while as you walked: or a creaking dung-cart heaped high with manure, or a broad flat cart heaped with sheaves, while a donkey in front made complaining pretence of pulling it and a couple of labourers in kilts and sunburns pushed from behind. Then the people and the animals would be gone again, leaving nothing but the river, where everyplace the water touched the land was greened with papyrus rush, and the blue-white of the local water lily carpeted the open stretches like noon sky fallen into the water.

Once, and then twice as they walked, Iaon heard a high faint cry and looked up to see sharp narrow wings cutting the air, a _hierax_ -hawk soaring over. _I see what the hawk sees,_ said a God's voice in his memory: _what the sun sees._ … _And what other eyes are looking through_ that _one's eyes?_ Iaon found himself wondering.

In other moods, the surveillance might have unnerved him. But now Iaon was finding it strangely reassuring. _Despite what the Ennead might or might not think, we've got_ someone _kindly disposed who's keeping an eye on us._

There was still a bit of irrational nervousness clinging to Iaon which he'd been at pains not to let the God see after his initial surprise. He'd got quite used to being snatched magically out of danger at a breath's notice. There would be none of that here. They were on their own, away from all the things they were used to having at hand to keep them safe…

 _Well, not_ all _the things._ The God's mind became sharper with increased threat, not less so. _Just as well,_ Iaon thought. In the meantime, a return to handling defense the way he'd been used to handling it all the rest of his life was no great burden. You could have all the magic cloaks you liked, but if you didn't keep your eyes open to what was going on around you, they wouldn't do you much good.

So they walked, and the steady pace ate up the stadia. Iaon stopped them at one point when the road was empty of people both before and behind for as far as the eye could see to get into the pack the God was carrying, and he brought out the water and put a little wine in it for flavor and the two of them started walking again, passing the bottle back and forth.

"So it would be nice," he said as he passed the amphoriska to the God, "if you would tell me now."

"Tell you what, master?"

"How you're planning to get us in there."

"In where?"

Iaon rolled his eyes. "The House of Lilies. You said we're going to walk in the front door."

The strange eyes in the strange face gave him exactly the God's look of superior amusement, minus the cloaking shadow. "And so we are."

"And are you planning to tell me eventually just _how_ we're going to do this? Ideally before we actually _get_ there."

"Still working out some of the minor details," the God murmured.

Iaon sighed. "You," he said, "just love seeing me surprised, don't you."

The God smiled and said nothing.

"I tend to react better when I actually have some warning…"

"I promise you, my P— my master, you'll have all the warning you need."

"Git," Iaon muttered, for _that_ was a line he'd heard before. _The night we ran into the amphisboena, for example._ Yet it was hard not to smile. Because the events that had come of what happened that night had been… _Just fine. Indeed, more than fine._

There came a point with the God where one had to simply trust him. So Iaon relaxed into that state—at least as far as he could when they were out on the road, without a Shadowcloak or a small army of militant shadows to carry out their master's will—and got back to enjoying the scenery: though, as always, with one eye to where people might suddenly pop out in an ambush.

Late afternoon brought them at last to Ibbis. It was a smaller town than Dashur had been, but had a better market, and now that the day-labourers were getting off work and the boatmen were done for the day and tying up their boats at the town's docks, there were a lot of stalls in the market selling people roast things on spits: whole perch grilled over charcoal, and beef wrapped in caul, and lamb and rabbit and spitted quail. There was no pork, as in this part of Khem there was a feeling that it was unclean, but Iaon felt he could do without crackling for one night. And as for the God, despite all his desultory comments about food and eating while on the road, he went after the roast beef as if some cow had offended him.

Iaon, secretly pleased, said nothing. The marketplace was very full—half the town seemed to be having its supper there—but all the same he shepherded the God out of there and away from a third piece of the beef before enough people saw them to really take notice. Shortly they were on the road northward again as the shadows lengthened.

About an hour's walk north of Ibbis, sunset drew near, the great dust-softened solar disk settling itself flaming behind the long ridge to their left as they made their way along what had become an increasingly deserted road. Now twilight fell about them with surprising speed, and just as quickly the scents around them began to change, cooling somehow, strangely seeming dryer even though the wide water of the Nile was still right there past the date palms, glinting between them. A subtle warm radiance rested on it, an indefinite colour reflecting the last lingering carmine of the western sky.

Iaon looked around for a likely spot in which to settle for the night. Behind them, running up toward the long western ridge, was some ground where someone had been haying: there were still a few hayricks in it waiting for someone to send a cart for them. And there was a place off toward the edge of the field where some where some big boulders lay, possibly washed or tumbled down down from the ridges in ancient days, but that was good rather than bad, it was cover. _All very good. Borrow some hay, pile it up inside the rocks there, put our bedpads down, we'll sleep soft enough-_

The God touched Iaon's arm.

Iaon turned hurriedly. "What, is someone coming—"

"Yes," the God said, looking east over the water.

And slowly, squat and a little misshapen as it shouldered its way up out of the east, here came Artemis's cold chariot, more golden than silver at its rising, and laid a broad path of shifting electrum-coloured fire across the wide water. Far away, on the other side of the long ridge behind them, a desert fox barked at the moon a couple of times and fell silent.

In unison they held still to watch that golden light go more silver as it lifted itself above the water. Everything around them had gone quiet except for the faint whisper of water along the riverbank. Down by the foreshore, the lilies carpeting the nearer water were glowing in the growing light like tiny moons themselves.

"Beautiful, isn't it," the God murmured.

Iaon nodded slowly. "Though not the kind of thing _you_ usually spend much time on," he said. "The moon, the sun…"

"Doesn't mean I don't appreciate them," the God said.

Iaon nodded again, and slipped his arm through the God's.

They stood there until the moon had gone silver and lifted up high enough for the Nile's whole surface to become one broad slick slide of diamond glitter. "All right," Iaon said softly, "come on, let's get settled."

Putting their night's bivvy right was the matter of a few minutes: heap up the straw, spread out the sleeping pads that the God had been carrying rolled up in the pack. After more digging to bring out most of the rest of their food, the God fetched out for each of them a soft dark heavy throw of the kind a guest in a noble house might be given when they were going to sleep on a bench in the great hall or near the fire.

They sat together with the throws arranged so they were under them together, their backs to the biggest of the boulders, and filled in the spaces from their snack in Ibbis with bread and oil and the last two stuffed pitas, with the rest of the scones for dessert, while drinking the last of the rich red wine by the moonlight. The God was tired and still in thinking mode, so Iaon didn't plague him with talk. But when he finally leaned sideways against Iaon and breathed out and closed his eyes, Iaon smiled and shifted him, pulling the strange short-haired head down into his lap. "Rest," he said.

"Won't," the God muttered.

"Yes you will," Iaon said, and leaned against the cool stone, listening to it making little soft cracking noises to itself as it gave up the day's heat.

Eventually he heard the snore. It wouldn't last long—the God didn't willingly sleep outside his House, as far as Iaon knew. But the moment was strangely precious: the God out in the world without his usual protections, instead trusting _Iaon_ to protect him.

Iaon leaned back against the stone and looked at the moon as it kept rising, washing the nearest stars out of the sky and etching all the landscape in silver, while the most amazing immortal in Heaven or Earth or the Realms Below lay warm in his lap with his face pushed into Iaon's stomach and his arm snugged around Iaon's waist. Iaon reached out to make sure of where his sword was, tucked the throw a little more securely around the God's shoulders, and looked southward.

Back that way along their day's path, the moonlight was so bright that he could just glimpse some of the ancient buildings they'd been passing all day—some mere rounded domes of stone, half buried in downslid gravel and sand: then other newer ones, taller, less rounded, more angular, stepped. One of these they'd passed not long before was kind of bent-looking, as if the architect had taken to drink halfway through the planning stages and transposed some figures. And the newest ones-though "new" was relative, Iaon knew they were at least a thousand years old-stood up sharp, smooth, perfectly pointed.

 _How many lives spent building those,_ Iaon thought. _In terms of time, in terms of labour… But it's all done now, isn't it, what they were doing. Death came for them, as it always comes. For the ones building the tombs, for the ones destined to go into them._

And without warning his thoughts went back to the little rounded broken hillocks back by the shore north of Lerna, all softened over with salt grass. _And for them,_ he thought. _That terrible wedding. All seeming at first so full of the promise of peace, and instead…_

In the great moonlit silence lying all around them, Iaon worked not to hear the muffled screams.

 _And then, in the morning, after the staff's spent the whole night clearing it all up, the remnants of the celebration-instead of the day-after party, instead of wine and presents for the newlyweds' new homes, and a noisy happy sendoff… forty-nine bridal couches, soaked with blood. Forty-nine bodies, and the most horrible_ epaulia _ever seen._ Forty-nine pyres, and a pall of black smoke that had to have obscured the heavens. It was a horrible thing, something Iaon had noted often enough on the battlefield, how pyre-smoke seemed to hug the ground, how the stink of burning bone crept about everywhere. It was no wonder that again and again in the _Iliad_ there were lines about men pouring out wine to the Gods in sacrifice and begging them for wind, even just a breath of it, enough to hasten the pyre's burning and take that smoke _away_.

He sighed, looked out toward the river. All around them here lay the tombs, the temples, the dead, lingering. _Well, it's part of life, after all._ That was hardly news, for men or empires. Iaon thought of those very largest pyramidal tombs they'd glimpsed to the north of Memphis, distant through the haze, while standing up high with Horus. The kings who'd commanded those to be built, the men who'd built them: all gone now. The dynasties responsible for them: long since vanished. Nothing was left but (in the political sense) a huge civil service that hadn't noticed its empire was getting very old, heading gently and gradually toward its final sleep. And after it was gone, what was left would be what was around them now: the sand and the starlight, and the river running through it all, and the wind breathing over the water.

"The East Wind…" said the God's voice into his stomach.

 _Oh well,_ Iaon thought, _so much for any more sleep for_ him _._ "Never met him," Iaon said. "Westie's brother, is it?"

"Yes," the God murmured back. "He plucks the unworthy off the Earth. And there's going to be a lot of that, my master. Not right this minute of course. But soon enough…"

Gods only knew what _that_ meant. "Sorry. Did I wake you?"

"No. Haven't really been asleep."

Iaon declined to mention the snoring. "All the same, you should try. Even you get tired. And more so when we're steadily exerting ourselves like this."

"No. Sleep's not what I want right now." The God turned and stretched and then boosted himself up a little, enough to push up out of Iaon's lap and lean on an elbow.

"Well, they used to tell us in the army, if you can't sleep, at least rest. Not as good, but better than nothing."

A snort. "Boring."

Iaon laughed at that. Some things about the God didn't change no matter where he was or what he was wearing.

"We could do other things."

That caught Iaon a little by surprise. "Oh?"

"Indeed." The God inside the Tchesmu-disguise was looking up into Iaon's eyes. "After all, a man may do what he pleases with his slave."

The thought made Iaon shiver with a combination of deep discomfort and rather disturbing desire. "No."

"And in some of the ways that matter," that harsh voice said-for the first time since they came, going a little soft around the edges, hinting at the darker, sweeter rumble beneath-"you _have_ enslaved me. So why not pretend… just this once… that you have that kind of power? And use it."

"Because it's not something that's kind to do," Iaon said. His father's words to him, a long time ago. "Or _right_ to do. Because a man's life becomes a bitter enough thing to him when he's enslaved. Why remind him of the bitterest of the things that he's lost—the right to say no?"

"But that wouldn't really be happening, my master." The voice was dropping deeper, going velvety, and the combination of it and the words it was speaking was doing something unnerving to Iaon. The hair was standing up all over him. "Why not just this once? As a pastime, as a play between us? For there's no one here to hear. No one who could possibly say, when the dawn comes to rising, 'I saw that man order his slave to do the most shocking things to him… and the slave _did them.'"_

Iaon held very still. Or at least most of him did.

"Because what in Heaven or on Earth can a slave do but what his master tells him?" That voice had dropped fully into its familiar form again, the sweet soft half-growl, half-purr that Iaon had heard against his ear on so many nights, teasing him, tempting him, sometimes begging him.

Iaon held still for one last moment, feeling the balance teetering, threatening to shift. All things were silence, waiting to see what he would do.

Then he reached over to the other's face and touched it. The cheekbones were all wrong, the eyes were dark with something besides arousal. "You are a _very_ bad God," he murmured.

Those other eyes closed: that face pressed into his hand as the head bowed.

"So listen to me now," Iaon said. "When we get home… when the door of the House is shut, and the door of your Chamber is shut, and we two are on our couch… then, all right, _then_ I will play this play with you. Because such plays are part of what lovers do, sometimes. But out here, right now? Don't let your semblance drag you places that wouldn't be wise for either of us to go."

Those eyes opened again, narrowed. The mouth opened to argue.

"Maybe you're a little too _good_ at building these semblances," Iaon said. "Remember the Lady Xanthe?"

Slowly, and rather reluctantly, the mouth closed.

"Some other time," Iaon said, "and in our own place, you'll be Tchesmu again, and I will be your kind sentimental master Eperitos who wants to make up for the scars someone else put on you. And I promise you… when we do that, you'll _never_ forget it."

Those eyes suddenly went rather darker.

"But tonight?" Iaon slid his hand down the other's shoulder, then down his arm, to take his hand and stroke one thumb over the finger that had once been broken. "Tonight I really need to sleep a while. And if you're not going to sleep, sit up and keep watch: and then wake me for mine."

"Very well," the God said, and sat up. "Come on then."

And then it was Iaon's head in the God's lap, warm, and a dark shape leaning down over him and stroking his hair as it tucked the throw in around him. "Iaon Dasosarchëidês," said that voice, very, very softly. "You keep me right."

Iaon smiled. "Somebody has to," he said, and closed his eyes: and for the next few hours, at least, knew no more.

***

They were both ready to move before dawn, possibly for different reasons. The God _did_ sleep again on Iaon's watch—all the food, Iaon reckoned, had caught up with him—and having digested it woke up eager and full of nervous energy, mustering his physical and mental forces, preparing to go into battle. Iaon was doing the same, in his own manner. But regardless of other issues, no one who had passed that way before could want to miss, in such surroundings, the rising of the sun. Even when he had been nervous about people all around them who might be intent on killing him, Iaon had never forgotten dawn by the Nile.

Now he stood up as a host stands to greet a guest and saw that first blinding sliver of day breaking the far surface of the world, like a fiery weapon raised against night. Within moments the great disc seemed to have leapt free of the chains of the horizon and up into the waiting morning. And high, high up in the airs of the dawn, they both heard the cry of the hawk.

"The game's afoot, my master," said the God. "And on the wing. Let's go play our part."

Only a short walk was left to them. Three hours later they were on a ferry beating across the river to the heart-island of the City of the White Walls, blazing in the day, and Tchesmu stood in the prow of the boat, among tourists and casual commuters and market-stall men with baskets of new-caught fish and crates of chickens.

"Memphis," Tchesmu said low, and smiled.

And something drew a cold finger down Iaon's spine. _Death,_ it whispered in Iaon's ear.

He shivered, and loosened his sword in its scabbard, and as the boat slid up to the dock kept a close eye on the scarred, dark-haired shape standing in the prow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Fishing in the grounds of his estate:** This was a popular pastime among the wealthy. Even small Egyptian estates in the later dynasties routinely had canals and ponds within their walls, fed by water from the nearest river. Tanks of fish were kept not just for the household's culinary use, but for pleasure fishing. The gentleman of leisure below (plainly untroubled by the occasional passing butterfly) illustrates how it's done.
> 
>  
> 
>   
> **Tchesmu:** The [hunting hound of ancient Egypt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesem) (also transliterated as _tjesm_ or _[tesem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesem)_ ),  most famously pictured on the so-called "Hierakonpolis Palette" or ["Two Dogs Palette"](http://xoomer.virgilio.it/francescoraf/hesyra/palettes/dogs.htm) in the Ashmolean -- though it appears again and again in Egyptian art of many dynasties. The _tchesm_ was best known as a sighthound but also hunted by scent. The art shows them to have been brown- or golden-coated and elegantly slender, though not as thin as greyhounds: analysis of the skeletons of mummified _tchesmu_ has led archaeoveterinarians to suggest that they were actually closer to terriers in body build, except for the long legs.  
>   
>  The AKC breed referred to as the [Pharaoh Hound](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh_Hound) has physical similarity to the ancient Egyptian breed, but DNA analysis has apparently eliminated any possibility of relationship.
> 
> There's some conjecture that the prick-eared long-snouted creature whose head the God Anubis wears is not actually the head of a jackal, but of a tchesm. ...Who knows?)
> 
> More notes on [Horus’s head](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/99129621827/till-we-have-cases-ch-33-notes-and-links#horushead), [nomes](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/99129621827/till-we-have-cases-ch-33-notes-and-links#nomes) (not gnomes), [date plums](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/99129621827/till-we-have-cases-ch-33-notes-and-links#dateplums), [silliness](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/99129621827/till-we-have-cases-ch-33-notes-and-links#silliness), and other issues can be found at the [Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/)


	34. Of a Day in Memphis and an Opening of Gates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the ground in the capital of ancient Egypt, and in deep cover while investigating the cold-case murder of the forty-nine husbands of the Danaïds, the Consulting God and Iaon spend the day establishing their alibis before placing themselves in the murder suspects’ hands…
> 
>  
> 
> _Warnings for crocodiles, carnivory, canon-typical violence, dirty linen and bickering (audible and inaudible), small change, petty larceny, and tourism in the second degree. (Also [yay!] cats.)_
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks again to Ivyblossom, the preferred β of mortals and divinities alike.
> 
> ...Notes can be found both at the end of this chapter and at the [Lotus Room Tumblr.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/112612209462/notes-for-till-we-have-cases-ch-34)

Not for Lower Egyptian cities the wiggly, winding, terrain-dictated anarchy of the hearts of Greek city-states, mostly built on hills for defensibility’s sake and in ways that meant the local acropolis had a nice view of both the scenery and all the primary approaches. In Lower Egypt almost all the major cities were at flood-plain level (or just above it) and built on the flat, and when you combined this with the imperatives of a priestly caste that was hot on mathematics as the secret language for communicating with Divinity, what you inevitably got was geometrical city-shapes—squares or rectangles divided into grids, and any local irregularities in the terrain graded away in the early building stages by unlimited volunteer labour glad to do the job in exchange for religious dispensations.

This orderly turn of mind made Egyptian cityscapes a bit boring and same-ish, but handy and manageable for the tourist. Once you’d seen one big Egyptian city, you’d pretty much seen them all: a long north-south avenue or two with shorter east-west streets bisecting them, and everything laid out orderly inside that basic structure. Temples in prime locations on the main avenues, palaces never far from them on the cross streets (inevitably with an eye to the best views over the water and catching the prevailing south wind in the hot weather), public granaries handy to the piers at the ends of the cross-streets for shipping; compounds and villas of the noble or wealthy casually clustered in the palace neighbourhoods, close enough to be cosily social without seeming sycophantic; government buildings centrally sited, treasuries tucked away here and there among them.

Now Iaon led the way up from the docks at the end of a side street toward one of those long avenues, admiring the height and thickness of the city walls whilst privately deploring the predictability of the way things here were laid out—as easy for the invader to anticipate as for the tourist. _Not my problem, though,_ he thought, _thank all Gods;_ the thought of walking the thousands of paces’ worth of the city-island’s walls every day, checking for weaknesses, made the leg that had once been bad twinge uncharacteristically. _No matter. We’ve got other problems coming up to be dealt with..._ Instead, as they made their way up into the town through the tumult of a shipping and mercantile quarter getting started with the day’s business, Iaon did his best to simply enjoy the beauty and novelty of the setting: the familiar delightfully edged with the strange, the difference of the faces and voices around them, the scent and brightness of the air. They had a long day ahead of them, and probably a difficult (and likely dangerous) one at the end of it. _Best enjoy what you can at this end of things…_

But it wasn’t that easy. Iaon was still having trouble getting used to something that had happened more than once the day before on the open road. He would glance sideways to say something, and see no one there, and then his stomach would flip briefly with shock until he realized that the God _was_ there but some paces behind him, where a slave or servant would walk. Iaon had been annoyed before, every now and then, when he would do this drop-back with the God and people would misunderstand what was going on—mistaking it for servility when Iaon stayed out of his friend’s field of vision so as not to distract that extraordinary mind while it was working, or when he eased back a little to make sure some knife wasn’t about to be stuck into that long slender back while its owner was otherwise engaged. Now Iaon found himself being annoyed from the other side of the equation.

 _Not to mention that it makes it harder to keep an eye on what he’s up to…_ Which in a place as potentially interesting as this could be anything. Nor could Iaon rely for a warning on the fleeting impressions from the God that he’d increasingly been catching both in the House and when out on cases. When his partner was inside a semblance, Iaon was now discovering that the “feel” of him became an odd, muffled thing, faint and unreliable. _And does it go the other way, I wonder?_ Iaon thought. _Though it shouldn’t. He told me that he read my parents’ hearts while he was in the Lady Xanthe’s semblance. But things have been changing for him too—_

“Oi, _Greek!_ Put that _down,_ just what do you think you’re doing—”

 _Oh Gods not already,_ Iaon thought, and hurriedly turned around. In front of a wholesaler’s shopfront they’d just passed, a burly broad-faced russet-headdressed man in a longshoreman’s oilskin apron was struggling to pry a harpoon out of Tchesmu’s hands, the two of them swaying amid a confusion of stacked-up empty fish-smelling baskets and heaped-up half-mended nets. Iaon’s “slave” was meanwhile hanging onto the harpoon with a positively limpet-like tenacity while peering at the head of it so closely that it was likely to end up shoved up his nose.

“I’m _so_ sorry,” Iaon said, wading in between them in a hurry, grabbing the harpoon between the wholesaler’s grip (lower) and the God’s (higher) and pulling the barbed and glinting and very sharp edge of the harpoon’s head away from Tchesmu’s face. “I’m very _very_ sorry, he just keeps doing this kind of thing. This is always the problem with a rescue, isn’t it, you keep winding up having to deal with crap from the last master, I _swear_ I’m ready to hunt the bastard down and give him a taste of his own medicine, not that it’ll help _this_ one but I’d feel so much better afterwards. Now let go, Tchesmu, did you not _hear_ me, I _said_ —let— _GO!”_

Iaon set his balance the way he would have done when preparing to take a spear out of someone’s grip on the battlefield, assessed the necessary angles, and quickly first pushed, then yanked. The God and the wholesaler both lost their grip on the harpoon’s haft and staggered away a step in opposite directions. _“Honestly,”_ Iaon said, handing the harpoon back to the wholesaler the moment the man had recovered his balance, “I don’t know what gets into him sometimes, it’s hard to think how the last master might have used one of _these_ on him without leaving a mark but life’s full of mysteries. Are you all right, sir? So sorry, here, let me help you with that, oh, that’s good, I don’t think it’ll stain…”

There followed some moments of Iaon soothing the ruffled wholesaler’s temper while simultaneously bodyblocking the protesting Tchesmu to keep him from grabbing the harpoon again. And if Iaon’s free hand sneaked into the little coin pouch secreted tight inside his belt and a small but non-insulting amount of money shortly thereafter changed hands, very few beings in Memphis that day would have been equipped to perceive it happening—

 _“Two_ copper deben?” Tchesmu said in immediate outrage. “Oh, come now, certainly that’s far too _mmmf!”_

“See that, if you’ll stand that close and don’t keep your eyes open, that’s what happens,” Iaon said to the tall burly form that was presently more or less bent over double due to having accidentally been caught in the solar plexus by Iaon’s elbow as he turned. “Fine, there you go, straighten up, that’s right, see, it wasn’t that bad after all. Got your breath back? Good, let’s go. A thousand apologies again, sir, and great Hep the Master of the Nile send your nets full tomorrow morning. Come on, Tchesmu, we didn’t come all these stadia for you to waste my time standing around wheezing in the street. Step along smartly now, I want my breakfast.”

Iaon led the way up the street again, past more shops with their wooden shutter-tables letting down as they opened up for business, and next to him Tchesmu was walking straighter and scowling under his load as his breathing got back to normal. “So now will you do me a favour,” Iaon muttered, “and just _stop this?_ Once you might get away with it, but if you keep this up the town watch’ll get onto us and you’ll wind up locked up somewhere and I’ll have to pay gods _know_ what kind of fine to get you out and it’ll play merry Hades with our schedule.”

“But master—”

“Yes, now you’re going to tell me why a harpoon was so bloody important all of a sudden.”

“Didn’t you see the iron, master, didn’t you see the _edge,_ especially near the point—”

“Yes I did, in fact I believe I was instrumental in keeping it from getting stuck into your eye.”

“—the characteristic rippling, it looks like somebody here is close to inventing pattern welding—”

Iaon rolled his eyes and made an addition to his ever-lengthening list of Science No One Understands Yet. “Tchesmu,” Iaon said. “Shut up.”

Tchesmu narrowed his eyes, opened his mouth.

“Or no, better still, _don’t_ shut up.”

The “slave” shut his mouth again in apparent confusion.

“Tell me about that man there. The one in the blue kilt, with that big round tied-up thing on his head. What _is_ that, anyway? No, don’t stare.”

 _“You’re_ staring.”

“Not now I’m not, because we can’t both stare. No, I’m _not_ stopping here, come on, are you trying to tell me that all of a sudden you can’t do the Work while you’re walking?”

“It takes longer when I’m… like this.”

“Oh, making _excuses_ now are we.”

“Ridiculous, my master.” The “slave” straightened, sniffed, took a last look over his shoulder and walked on. “Typical short-term postural curvature from working hunched over a lap desk and getting too absorbed in the work, typical callouses on the index finger and thumb, so a scribe of course, demoted to porter duty recently, carting rolls of papyrus around, rather a comedown for an educated young man. But the lesser callouses on the _left_ index finger and thumb are an indicator, got on the wrong side of his chief scribe recently by the looks of it, ambidextrous but anybody would know it’s bad luck here to write left-handed. Doing it to impress someone, most likely his chief scribe’s lady friend, _she_ knows it’s bad luck too but she’s more interested in watching him demonstrate what he can do with both hands, in other words what he’s going to be able to do to _her_ with both hands when his boss’s back is turned. Because as it happens the chief scribe is planning on trading up to one of the Nomarch’s ladies he’s been seeing on the sly while ‘working late at the palace’. His mistress has twigged, though, and so has the junior scribe, so after a little preliminary canoodling they’ve decided they’ll…”

Iaon let the sound of the story the God was telling him fade into the background a little, for mostly he was watching the expressions fleeting across Tchesmu’s face as the tale unfolded: the amusement, the scorn, the quirk of a brow, the glint in the eyes at sudden realisation, the narrowing of them in concentration, the way they widened in satisfaction as some lurking truth was suddenly revealed. Iaon was so very much enjoying provoking those expressions and then having the luxury of actually seeing them out in the open instead of as shadowy half-seen hints. _Is his face doing this all the time under his shadow, and me hardly ever able to do more than get a glimpse of it? That wrinkle up at the top of his nose? And the way his mouth curls,_ there, _just like that, when something’s funny? It’s just a damned shame. Even without the shadow, in the Chamber when the starlight’s brightest, it’s so hard to see, just not the same as it is out here in the light of day, so amazing to watch the face reflect moment by moment what that marvelous mind is up to. He may say_ my _face shows what my mind’s doing but so does his, I wonder if_ that’s _why he…_

“…nothing but trouble because the Nomarch’s wife’s lady-in-waiting is having a torrid affair with one of her co-workers, and when the chief scribe turns up one night and catches the two ladies in, shall we say, one of those skin-to-skin conversations, he’s going to—”

Iaon blinked as they got closer to the corner of the cross street and the first of Memphis’s north-south boulevards. “All right, stop now, just _stop._ How can you possibly know about not just _his_ affair, and his _boss’s_ affair, but an affair two ladies are having at one remove?”

Tchesmu smiled a most knowing smile and opened his mouth again.

 _“No,”_ Iaon said. “Not until after breakfast. _And_ not until we’re somewhere more private. Market up that way, you think?”

“The preponderance of the traffic does seem to be moving in that direction, master. And people are coming back this way from up there with shopping in baskets.”

That was when the wind shifted. Iaon nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “Come on.”

They started across the street. “I’m right,” Tchesmu said, sounding bemused, _“how_ right, why am I right…?”

 _“I_ can smell meat grilling,” Iaon said, “if _you_ can’t.”

Tchesmu’s stomach produced a truly astonishing growl. His eyes went wide.

“Sometimes food’s evidence too,” Iaon said. “One of these days you and your transport are going to get the message. Come on…” And he led the way across the avenue, crossing in company with a lot of other people who had paused on this side until there was something of a break in the cart and chariot traffic.

On the far side of the wide pale granite-paved street Iaon paused to let the crowd about them disperse a bit, and looked up and down the boulevard. Away in both directions it was a long stretch of white-walled and -pillared buildings, touched with bright colour here and there, everything smooth of line, simple, elegantly adorned—restrained where Babylon had been over the top, dignified where Babylon had been brazen. But at the same time there were places high up in every one of those stately buildings where cornices of age-old stone were crumbling, whitewash peeling away and paint colours long faded, leaving massive statues of ancient gods looking out blind-eyed into the day. _So old,_ Iaon thought. _So_ very _old. And not seeing, any more, the symptoms of the slide, they’ve been here so long._

_And when this place, this empire, goes at last…what happens to its Gods? Immortal they may be. But what becomes of them when there’s no longer anyone to believe?_

He shook his head. “Come on,” Iaon said again, and he and Tchesmu headed along the side street again toward the place where the good smells and (increasingly) the hubbub of voices were coming from.

***

When they finally got into the Great Market of Memphis, any thoughts Iaon might still have been entertaining on the ephemerality of men or Gods were driven straight out of his head at the same time the place was taking his breath away. It was a wide rectangular walled space held securely within the greater walls of Memphis, spanning almost the whole space between the two main avenues. All around the edges of it, built into the whitewashed walls, were fixed stalls and bars and even eating houses. And in the midst of it, easily a stade and a half wide and nearly three stadia long, the Market itself lay spread out in the bright sunshine in aisle after aisle of things Iaon had never in his life seen before, and many more things he _had_ seen but never in such size or profusion.

Iaon made his way forward into a noisy, bustling muddle and crush of people in every kind of dress, of every kind of colour, heading seemingly in every direction at once, their arms full of things to sell or things just bought, and the vast majority of them shouting. It was like being buffeted by a whirlwind of clothes and conversations as you elbowed your way through the jostling throng, bumping into stalls piled high with the greens and yellows and oranges of fruit, hung heavy with the red and white of butchered meat and bone, rippling with the blinding blue and crimson of unrolled silks and bright-dyed linen, glinting with polished bronze and vivid glass that gleamed in downcast patterns of sunlight falling through slitted awnings. And every view was cut off and revealed again, second by second, by the pushing, pressing bodies all around—dark, pale, tall, short, broad or narrow, perfumed with precious unguents or smelling of the street, garbed in coarse grimy rags and tatters or in linen muslins delicate as air. Tchesmu—whose arm Iaon had taken for the moment due to concerns about his partner possibly drowning in too much data—was simply agog, mouth hanging open, staring, inhaling, drinking it all in.

“Up and down the aisles once,” Iaon said, “and then sit down and have a serious breakfast?”

“Mmm,” Tchesmu said in the vaguest possible agreement, his eyes alight with interest in absolutely everything else but his stomach, which growled again.

 _Anybody who bothered looking at him would take him for a simple rural yokel,_ Iaon thought. _A small-town slave at best. And bearing in mind what we’ve come to do… that couldn’t be better._ He smiled to himself, glanced around at the huge space, picked a spot near the far corner of the furthest wall to get their tour started, and headed toward it with Tchesmu in tow.

The sheer range of things on offer was… _Amazing. Just fantastic._ Acres of round flat breads stacked in baskets, rank on rank of clay-sealed stoneware jugs of beer, heaps of every fruit and vegetable that Iaon knew the name of and many that he didn’t, tunics and robes laid out over tables, songbirds in cages and sweetmeats in pottery dishes, fish arrayed on marble trough-tables with jaws agape and startled dead eyes and scales shining like silver coins in the sun, leathers and weapons and jewelry and flowers and codices and jars and wooden toys and lamps and carvings and inks and brushes and cosmetics… And there were all manner of objects being hawked or bargained over that Iaon stared at as he passed them by and could _not_ figure out what they were for. A whole empire’s trade channeled through this place, everything that a city’s dwellers might need and a lot they might simply desire, and compared to the sparse practical little market in Iaon’s City, this one was simply staggering.

He justified the next hour’s dawdling to himself with the thought that there was no telling what detail here the God—now allowed to range off ahead, once Iaon was sure he wasn’t getting overloaded—might see and find useful in what they had to do tonight. For his own part Iaon was doing his best to stay alert through his “casual browsing”. Occasionally he caught a corner-of-the-eye glimpse of furtive movement at the edges of vision, trying to stay out of sight: the kind of furtiveness to which Iaon’s association with the God, and much clandestine skulking on the track of people themselves trying not to be seen, had rendered him very sensitive. _Well, of course there’ll be thieves here, petty crooks, spies for one or another priestly cabal or faction of the local sub-royal court…_ But Iaon kept getting distracted when something laid out on one of those stalls, or hung up over it, took him by surprise in a way that the wonders of the Tesko of the Gods never could. That, after all, was one more wonder in a place of wonders. _This_ was the ordinary mortal world, and here Iaon could still catch himself looking with astonishment at a clever new fastening for a swordbelt or (as now) a pile of unusually lush and beautiful produce. “My _gods_ , look at the size of those figs…”

“Dull,” said Tchesmu, trying once more to look preternaturally bored by Iaon’s prosaic concerns as he turned away. As he went his gaze lit on two passing slaves in blue linen kilts and headdresses who were carrying between them on poles a sealed painted box ornamented with curious characters.

“Focus now,” Iaon murmured.

“I _am_ focusing,” Tchesmu said, his eyes alight with interest in the box right up to the moment when he walked into the side of a stall selling carved wooden kitchenware.

Spoons and platters leapt rattling into the air and fell down on the sawdust-strewn bricks, and the predictable outraged shouting began. Iaon was starting to get used to the shouting at this point. He helped pick up the fallen (but fortunately unbroken) merchandise and made nice on the cranky stallholder, then grabbed the slightly stunned and still-wobbling Tchesmu by the elbow and steered him away. “So,” he said. “Any thoughts?”

Tchesmu rubbed absently at the bruise forming on his forehead. “The box was a feint”—

 _“Not_ about the box.”

“Master, what else would I possibly…” He trailed off as a woman went strolling past them, regally dressed in a broad glinting gold-and-enamel collar, a shift of diaphanous pure white linen, and a long raven-tressed wig every lock of which ended in a gold pendant set with a cabochon ruby. She was being followed down the market aisle by four linen-kilted children in assorted sizes (capering and shouting some kind of rhyme, correcting each other when they got it wrong, and laughing), a tame monkey (on a jeweled leash and wearing an embroidered diaper) scuttling along and chewing on a densely-written papyrus roll held in its little arms, and a white goat with golden eyes and curling, gilded horns (not leashed but following the group with single-minded purpose).

 _“Ohh,”_ Tchesmu breathed and clapped his hands together, momentarily rooted to the spot by apparently having stumbled across a set of deductive objects that even the God inside him found unexpectedly promising.

“No place to stand staring,” Iaon said, tugging at his “slave” and dragging him off through the crowd. “Though that _was_ a bit unusual, I’ll admit…”

“A _bit!”_

“Come on. Shall we do these last few aisles before we eat? Or food first?”

Tchesmu was watching the lady, the children, the monkey and the goat as they vanished around a corner. “Food’s boring—”

“Is it indeed. Even when your stomach’s making noises like that?”

“Like what, master?”

“Like you just swallowed a riverhorse.”

“Oh, come now, _exaggeration._ Wait, what’s _that?”_ Tchesmu pulled free and headed for the market’s next aisle.

Iaon laughed and followed him. As he came around the end of the aisle they were walking and turned into the next, Iaon once more caught a glimpse of one of those stealthy movements at the edge of vision, easily lost in all this bustle. What moved was always down low, below knee level. _And that’s why I kept having trouble seeing it before, because I’ve mostly been looking up at Himself all the time—_ But now he caught it; the flicker of golden eyes, a flirt of tail, ducking away under the cloth that hung down from a stall’s table.

 _Cats,_ Iaon thought. Now, in memory, he saw again, five or six times, the quick movements that had occurred near them in aisle after aisle of stalls, not being at all obvious about it. But the two of them had definitely been shadowed since they’d come in here.

Iaon had to smile. Yet there was something strange about it. What was stirring wasn’t one of his own memories, left over from the walks home to the City after visiting the little nameless towns down the road… but a different memory. Darkness swathing him, shadow veiling him, and _cats;_ cats following him for some reason that (in the memory) he didn’t quite understand…

Iaon caught up with Tchesmu, who was staring in fascination at a table piled with headdresses and wigs. “We’re being followed,” he said softly. “Have been for some time.”

Instantly interested, the eyes of his “slave” began flicking about. “No one I can see…”

Iaon paused, then wandered “idly” back down the aisle toward the wall that ran along the end of the rows of stalls. “My sandal strap,” he said. “Half a moment.”

Once by the whitewashed brick wall Iaon crouched down in a space between a wine stall and one selling cups and beakers of carved horn, braced his back against the wall, and started fiddling with the top strap of his sandal as if there was something wrong with it. Within moments something came out from under the vintner’s stall and brushed against Iaon. It was a little slender dark-brown cat with paler brown ears and nose and stripes on its tail, looking like someone had started painting a tabby from the rear end forward, downed tools for lunch, and then forgot to come back and finish the job. Standing with its side pressed up against Iaon’s thigh as he crouched, its tail laid up companionably against his side, the little cat—just barely out of the kitten stage—looked up at Iaon and opened a little triangular mouth to produce the smallest _mau_ -sound imaginable.

“Cats are divine here, master,” Tchesmu said, his voice amused, as Iaon reached down to pull the little thing up onto his lap. “We walk among gods…”

“Yes, I know what you are,” Iaon said, stroking it head to tail. “Don’t have anything for you, little one…”

The little cat said _mau_ again and started stomping its forefeet alternately on Iaon’s thigh, staring up at him with big green-golden eyes.

Iaon rubbed it behind the ears, and purring instantly began. He nodded, dug in his belt pouch long enough to come up with a small coin, and looked up, holding it out to Tchesmu. “Go get me a fish.”

“But master, I thought you said we were going to have—”

“Breakfast. More like lunch now, really. Anyway, we are, but him first. Go on.”

“Her,” Tchesmu said over his shoulder as he glanced around to locate the nearest fish stall.

“Oh?” Iaon peered around back of the cat, which he hadn’t done before: he’d been going more by bone structure. “Yes, fine. One of those silver fish we saw before, the ones with the dark tails. Just a little one, so she can eat it before some other cat comes and tries to steal it.”

“Of course, master.” The God was not going to break character, but as he headed off Iaon could tell he was suppressing the response he really wanted to make.

“Make sure they take the top fin off it!” Iaon called after him. “I don’t want her getting those barbs stuck in her throat!”

No answer came back. Iaon watched Tchesmu go with a slight smile. _Not often_ I _get to order_ him _around,_ he thought. But that wasn’t a sentiment he was going to share out in the open, even when the other party couldn’t speak. “See that,” he said to the little cat. “Now I get a reputation for being a finicky Greek with a soft heart, and you get a fish. Everybody wins.”

The purring continued nonstop. Iaon braced his back against the wall, petting the little cat and gazing out at the hot bright hubbub about him, and suddenly found himself thinking of the lands around his City, the look of the hills on the southbound road to the little villages with all the cats and kittens, the dark cool spring by the roadside, the shade of the olive trees…

The sudden heart-deep pang, which he hadn’t felt since his very first days away with the army, caught him by surprise. _Homesickness—?_

_But this is ridiculous. I have a home. And the one I have it with is right here with me…_

Iaon blew out an annoyed breath. Arêtë’s visit had stirred up all kinds of stuff in his head, things Iaon hadn’t thought of for weeks, if not months, and it was going to be very good when it all settled down again.

 _Yet is it_ right _for it to settle down?_ said something in the back of Iaon’s head. _Is it a good thing that I’ve been so willing to let a whole life slip away from me?_

He sucked in a breath. He’d been so happy since he came to the House. Was it possible that part of the happiness had been about shedding the burdens of what his life was about… princedom and its responsibilities, the pains and frustrations of the life he’d been bred and trained to, the difficulties of his personal circumstances. _Did I just walk away?_

 _You didn’t walk away. You were swept away,_ said another part of his mind.

_Yes, but how hard did I try to get back…?_

A shadow fell over him. Iaon glanced up as Tchesmu crouched down in front of him with a palm leaf across his hands. On the palm leaf were the two fillets of a fish the size of one of Iaon’s hands. Tchesmu hurriedly put the leaf down as the little cat started batting at it with a paw. Moments later she was standing on the leaf and devouring one of the fillets.

“Should have made them give you the head and tail too,” Iaon said as the two of them spent a few moments watching the cat eat.

“They kept them for stock, master.”

Iaon nodded in slight annoyance. His mother had told him never to let the fishmonger pull that on him, because _she_ wanted the head and tail for stock, thanks very much, and whose fish was it now that _she_ was paying for it? He could still remember having come home from the market a time or two _without_ the extra bits, and how when she’d finished scolding him the Queen had gone off muttering about sharp practice in the market, and how the stallholders would take your last obol off you if you let them…

He sighed at his own thought (“having come _home…”_ ) and held out his hand. Tchesmu looked surprised. “What, master?”

“My change?”

Tchesmu rolled his eyes, reached down inside his kilt and and tipped five or six very small copper coins into Iaon’s hand. Iaon frowned at them, recognising them as fractions of a full copper _deben,_ each one scratched with one or another of thebits-of-Horus’s-eye fraction-symbols they used around here _._ He spent a few moments recalling which of the shapes meant what. _Hmm, not as much change as I thought._ But then Iaon thought that Tchesmu had likely been overcharged—“foreigner tax” was the word for it in the market at home. _And anyway, if the God was going to cheat me as an experiment, he’d do it in some way I’d never catch him at…_

Iaon smiled and put the tiny coins away. He petted the little cat one last time—she arched her back against his hand while purring so hard it was actually making her vibrate while she ate—and stood up. “Come on, then. Her belly’s seen to. Let’s see to ours.”

For completeness’s sake, they did the last few aisles at speed, but there was nothing in them that (to Iaon at least) really stood out against the background of everything they’d seen so far. In fact, if he was going to admit the truth, Iaon would’ve had to confess that he’d been worn down somewhat by the sheer volume of _stuff_ they’d seen. _…No matter,_ he thought as his own stomach growled: _let’s get specific._ “What’re you up for?” Iaon said. “You were liking that roast beef last night…”

“Mmm.” As they passed the gateway that looked eastward toward the walls of the city and the view of the Nile and beyond, _Tchesmu’s_ gaze fixed on it thoughtfully and at length. His mind was turning back toward the ongoing case now, if it had ever entirely left it. _And this is going to be my last chance to get some food into him… Don’t wait around for him to dither, just make some choices_.

There were four or five food stalls down in the corner of the market past the gate, and two actual eating houses facing each other on either side of the corner, with wine jars half-sunk into the market-facing countertops and breads piled up next to charcoal pits that glowed under turning spits. “Quick,” Iaon whispered in Tchesmu’s ear as they approached. “Which of those is cheating its customers _least?”_

The focus of Tchesmu’s eyes went fiercely, delightedly sharp. A very short time later Iaon and his companion were sitting gnawing on short ribs of beef that came with pots of a sharp date-vinegar sauce to dunk them in, and drinking cool barley beer strained fresh from the jug. “—split condensation pattern on the jugs, so _obvious,”_ Tchesmu was murmuring, “the other place, they may _claim_ to be pre-straining their beer for their customers’ convenience, but in reality they don’t want you to know how long they’ve had the beer off the lees because you might realize that they’re mixing beer that’s gone sour with the fresher supply—”

“Amazing,” Iaon said, shaking his head. “But here, I’m running out of this sauce, let me have some of yours.” And then a second later, as Tchesmu was passing him his little brown pottery bowl, Iaon fumbled it and sloshed a little of the sauce on his companion’s tunic. “Oh damn, clumsy of me,” Iaon said. He dabbed ineffectually at Tchesmu’s tunic with a piece of the soft folded bread they’d been given along with the beef, whilst leaning on the bared forearm he’d apparently laid over his slave’s to brace him.

_There. Now, when we turn up at our suspects’ gates, we’ll be showing signs of having eaten earlier in the day._

_But they’ll be inviting us to dinner._

_You’re so sure of that,_ Iaon said, straightening up, though he let his bare forearm lie touching Tchesmu’s. _I wish I knew how but_ someone _won’t tell me! Anyway, we couldn’t know that before the fact, could we? A smart merchant-on-the-road would’ve had a bite and a sup early, because you can’t always count on anything later. And as for dinner: what makes you think_ you’re _going to get anything?_

Tchesmu’s eyes widened.

 _Well, you’re a_ slave! _If you’re lucky you’ll get a crust to gnaw under the table while their table-servants wait on them and me._ Iaon resisted the urge to sneak a glance at the reaction to this, and for now simply concentrated on gazing out at the marketplace as if his mind was ten thousand stadia away. _Yes, a thoughtful master would’ve made sure his slave had something to eat earlier in the day, just in the course of business. But later on he probably wouldn’t give his slave a second thought if he wound up as someone else’s guest. If the household’s nice, they’ll give the slave something out back in the kitchen with the other household help after dinner’s over, when they’re cleaning up the scraps. Otherwise he’ll just have to pig along somehow till it occurs to his master to feed him again._

For just a breath’s space Iaon glanced in his companion’s general direction. The expression of shock on Tchesmu’s face was choice. Iaon smiled reflectively down at his beef, dunking it in the sauce again. _What, did you have some idea that you were going to charm them into letting you sit down to dinner with me? Like_ that’s _going to happen. They don’t want their own slaves getting ideas. Some Egyptians think their slaves have too many rights as it is._ And he addressed himself once more to his beef bone. _Anyway, you’re always complaining about me stuffing you too full of food. Now you’re going to complain when just for one night I_ stop?

Tchesmu’s expression became an aggrieved scowl, which he turned on the splash of sauce on his tunic. “There’s always something,” he muttered.

Iaon just smiled. Teaching the God to deal rightly with his transport’s need for food during cases was going to be a lifetime pursuit. _Not that I’ve got_ _any other plans…_ “Want another?”

Tchesmu considered that. “If my master pleases.”

The ready acquiescence made Iaon a little suspicious, as it usually did. _But whatever he’s got going on in that mad head of his, another one makes sense. If they feed me only lightly and give me a lot of drink to try to make me talkative, I’ll be glad I had more in my stomach beforehand._ “As it happens, yes he does.”

So they had another rib apiece and split another jug of the thin cool bitter beer, and Tchesmu sat watching the passersby, deducing them idly in brief under-the-breath murmurs, like one whose first flush of hunger has been appeased and is now merely snacking to fill in the gaps. ”So many stories, my master,” Tchesmu said softly as Iaon nibbled away at the last of the sweet meat near the bone. “More than Athens, more than Babylon—”

“Makes you wonder what it would be like to live in such a place,” Iaon said, finishing with the bone and putting it aside.

“It does.” The look on the God's face was strangely reflective.

“Does it make you—nervous at all?”

Tchesmu turned a look on Iaon that was full of gentle scorn. But somehow Iaon wasn’t fooled. “It does, doesn’t it,” he said very softly.

Tchesmu drew himself up a bit where he sat, pushed his finished beef bone aside and began shredding the rest of his flatbread into little bits, scowling at it. “Any change in circumstance might well be unnerving at first,” he said. “Though any change can be handled, given time. But that isn’t an eventuality we can consider just yet.” He slid his gaze sideways to Iaon’s.

With a sigh, Iaon nodded. Being a mortal on Olympus was dicey enough at the moment; being Prince Iaon once more in the world of men was a whole different set of problems, one nowhere near being solved at the moment, and one that could wait< as could his curiosity about what else was lurking under the God’s uncertainty. “Fine. Stop that before it’s not fit for anyone but the mice.”

Tchesmu produced a small, sly smile.“How’s that a problem for you, my master? Sooner or later it’d be good news for the cats.” But all the same—not entirely, Iaon thought, because of the affectionately warning look Iaon fixed on him—he finished the bread.

“The river,” Tchesmu murmured as they rose. Iaon nodded, and the two of them made their way back to the arched gate through the market wall and down the side street to the ramp that led riverwards from it. They followed it down along the first of several shallow switchbacks along the city walls, which on that side weren’t sheer, as on the western side, but stepped, each course of wall with a broad balustraded terrace atop it.

Tchesmu paused about halfway along the first of these to lean on the balustrade, his gaze dwelling on lowest of the terraces below and the river beyond with the same intensity as it had on the lady with the children, the monkey and the goat. “Down there, my master,” he said, leaning over the balustrade for a better view. “You can see the crocodiles…”

“Mmm,” Iaon said. Due to the shadow of the city walls on the water on this side, he could see the other shadows moving under the surface, and the ones idling past that lowest terrace were big, indeed _unnervingly_ big. He thought of that old dame of the city, out with her retinue… then suddenly in the water. “…Same spot, you think?”

“Certainly a candidate, master.”

There were times when the eye of Iaon’s mind was too acute. This was one of them, as it summoned up the image of the water first splashing briefly bright with the fallen woman’s struggles, and then churned murky with that terrible slow-violent seize-and-roll of deadly predators starting to tear their prey into manageable pieces. _“How…”_ he breathed.

“Today’s the day we’ll find out,” Tchesmu said.

They walked on together down to where the path along the top of the wall switched tightly back to slope again toward the next terrace down. Iaon was the one who paused this time, just at the curve, where the wall fell sheer away on two sides and upward on the third, and it was easiest to see clearly that no one was within earshot. Quietly he said, “I’m still waiting for a little more explanation about what’s going to be happening.”

“I don’t like to give you more data than you need, my master. It impairs your believability.”

Iaon blinked. “Excuse me, _what?”_

“Think of how you were with that warehouseman, before. So spontaneous, so absolutely natural. But that was because you had no time to overthink it. Now do you understand why it would be an error to tell you too much about… what’s to come? When there’s a chance it would render you even a shade less perfectly—”

“Infuriated? Frustrated? Ready to turn you over my knee?”

“Less wondrously, transparently _believable_. Why add artifice born of pre-planning to something already perfect beyond the ability of Gods or men to see through? Because when you’re reacting spontaneously you’re so patently honest and direct and utterly _unconcealed.”_

Iaon pursed his lips in an expression that the God had to be so used to seeing, he almost certainly had it numbered and stored somewhere in his Palace of the Mind: Iaon-ΡΕα, Frustrated/Annoyed Amusement at Backhanded Compliment. “Ah, well, thanks. I think.”

“And as for your knee, well, a man may do what he pleases with his slave.”

“Oh, don’t you start singing _that_ song again.” Nonetheless without warning Iaon found himself thinking about their House, and the Chamber in their House, and the door of that Chamber shut, and— He cleared his throat. “And it’s just as I said yesterday: don’t think I don’t suspect this is _really_ all about how much you enjoy the way I get all impressed when you spring some brilliant solution on me out of nowhere.”

Tchesmu shifted the pack on his shoulders a little, dropped his gaze to the nearby balustrade; but if he was trying to hide a little curve of smile, he was failing. And was that a touch of _blush_ rising to those cheeks? “If such moments cause pleasure,” Tchesmu said, “for maximum effect, the praise must be earned.”

Iaon sighed and shook his head. “Come on,” he said. “It’s a few hours yet before we can realistically turn up on our suspects’ doorstep. Let’s wander down by the river and take a closer look. After that, well, there are some temples I wouldn’t mind looking at…”

“Sightseeing,” Tchesmu sighed as he straightened up. “How utterly pedestrian and _boring._ What must it be _like_ in your funny little mind—”

“As if you don’t have a pretty good idea,” Iaon said. “So don’t make me tell you in more detail! And by the way, in case you haven’t noticed, we _are_ pedestrians. So come _on.”_

***

It was mostly teasing about the temples—though the thought had occasionally crossed Iaon’s mind that it’d be nice to have seen a good sampling of the world’s best ones before the day eventually came when the God would need a temple of his own. But for the hours that followed they ambled about Memphis as any tourists might, and despite his best attempts at scorn, Tchesmu kept being swept away by fascination with the city and its people. Iaon concentrated on making sure they found themselves in places where crowds would be gathered. This _did_ mean a few of the great temples, right enough. Like hundreds of others Iaon and Tchesmu leaned over the golden railings of the Serapeum for a time to watch the Apis Bull graze the manicured turf in his sacred precinct, while servant-devotees in white robes serenaded him with flute and lyre. And they briefly looked over the architectural excesses of the great Temple of Ptah, added to enthusiastically (though in sometimes execrable taste) by every Pharaoh for the last millenium and a half.

But they also visited the stir and bustle of the docks again, and the great public pleasure-park on the south end of the city island, and once—to Tchesmu’s absolute delight—they wandered into an open plaza where a commonlaw court was in session. _Must happen every day in a place this big,_ Iaon thought, watching with amusement as two holders of rival market stalls verbally savaged each other in front of a bored magistrate, while an equally bored scribe took notes.

All this was fine until one of the audience who (despite his own expectations) was _not_ bored started making his opinions known. _“—Completely_ ridiculous,” shouted the “slave” by Iaon’s side, “are you stupid or merely blind? Of _course_ the idiot on the blue apron is guilty! If his haircut and that scar on his right arm aren’t more than enough to make it plain to any reasoning being, just look how his _kilt_ is folded in the back!”

“No,” Iaon said, _“no_ no no no…” and latched onto Tchesmu and dragged him out of the courtyard before the magistrate’s flail-bearing sergeants-at-arms could bestir themselves. “Hush up now, just, oh _no_ you don’t, just be quiet now and come _on—!”_

But to the God’s credit, further outbursts proved few and relatively far between as the afternoon rolled on. While the sun swung further westward he and Iaon poked about the narrow alleys and crammed-together houses of the lower city’s workers’ quarter, inspected the painted and gilded frontage of the Nomarch’s palace and the dignitaries passing in and out of it, examined heaped wagonloads of corn in front of the massive stone-built granaries while priests sampled the grain for moisture content and gleeful temple cats chased the scavenging, scurrying pigeons around on the flagstones. Tchesmu even paused to spend what seemed to Iaon like a surprisingly long time leaning on a balustrade near the southernmost wall and analyzing the river traffic. For the God this business was apparently freighted with unsuspected depths of meaning (”A number of interesting conclusions, my master. Possibly even disturbing. Something to discuss with… interested parties, later”).

But Iaon knew the apparent slowing of their pace wasn’t about weariness: it was a gathering of energy, a concentration of intent. Soon enough the shadows of the nearby hills were sliding down through the papyrus-fringe of the Nile and into the dark blue water as, from Memphis’s highest western wall, Iaon and his companion watched the last of the day’s fishermen furl their boats’ lateen sails and make for the faint twisting trails of smoke coming up from the dockside fish-grillers’ fires.

That was when Tchesmu put his head up into the onshore breeze, which Iaon realised was just beginning to shift to the offshore. For that moment, as he watched Tchesmu’s nostrils flare, he realized with a shiver down his back that his “slave’s” name was well chosen: the keen eyes, the look of a tracker, of a creature born and bred for the chase, scenting the wind, ready.

“Now,” Tchesmu said, _“now_ it’s time.”

And inside him Iaon’s blood began to sing as it always did when the God announced that the game was on. “Let’s go,” he murmured.

Together, schooling their steps to look tired, they made their way toward the dock of the ferry that would take them across to the west bank of the river, and the road that ran alongside.

***

As it got closer to sunset, the coast road was briefly growing busier—people and beasts of burden heading home after a long day’s work, or hurrying away from the city to reach their next destination, usually one of the smaller outlying towns twenty or thirty stadia further up the Giza plain like Mnest or Aqet (which was theoretically their own destination). Iaon and Tchesmu made their way along in the midst of the crowds, not hurrying, keeping pace with hand-pushed carts and ox-drawn wagons and the people tramping wearily beside or behind them: blending in. _Just one more dusty merchant and his dusty slave,_ Iaon thought… though he was having to work on keeping the spring out of his step.

That pleasurable sting and prickle of excitement under his skin was getting stronger. _It’s as if I’ve been expecting trouble since we left the House,_ he thought, _waiting for it to start, and I’ve been getting antsy the longer it took coming. But now we’re right on top of it. Now it begins._ Indeed he was already becoming hyperaware of the movement of the people around him, having to restrain himself from looking around him too alertly at those who got too close for his comfort and then drifted away again. The hair on the back of Iaon’s neck rose for no reason, rose again, and he swallowed and forced himself not to look behind. After all, Tchesmu was behind him, watching his back, and that was more than enough attention to cover _that_ quarter. Yet this too was wrong in its way, an uneasy reversal of the normal state of things when the two of them were on a case…

Iaon flexed his shoulders a bit and gazed ahead at the long shadows spilling sideways from everyone and everything, toward the river on their right since this last curve of the road. _Not much longer,_ he thought with a little leap of the heart as he looked north, _because there it is._

This part of the road out of Memphis had been lined, on and off, with the mansions and villas of the wealthy, usually set back behind high walls, sometimes a number of them clustered together. But past this most recent curve in the road lay a wide green space to the left between the nearest of these houses and the next structure along, a few hundred paces away. The green space was wetland planted with papyrus, now alive with the sound of waterbirds settling in for the evening in the warm slanting light, all hooting and peeping at one another, or splashing as they dived for an end-of-day snack. Past the waving fronds and the blue flowers rose tall palm trees and feathery-leaved acacias and slender tamarisks stirring in the evening breeze; and beyond those rose a high strip of white between the water and the road.

Their goal was right ahead of them, sheltered behind its high white walls that were painted here and there with decorative column-images. The bronze spear-ornamentation on their high cornices caught the last glints of the sun as it started to settle behind the western hills, and a long rosy frieze-stripe of light had painted itself along the end-wall’s top and was now ever so slowly thinning as the sun-disk gently sank.

 _And now,_ Iaon thought as they approached, _I just let whatever’s going to happen… happen._ That cunning mind behind him had laid a plan, was about to trigger it somehow. Now it was Iaon’s job to react to what came in whatever way seemed right to him. And he found himself smiling ironically at the memory of Tchesmu saying, _Why add artifice born of pre-planning to something already perfect beyond the ability of Gods or men to see through?_ At first it had merely sounded like the God trying to blather Iaon into not making a fuss about being kept in the dark. Now all of a sudden it seemed normal, like nothing to worry about. _Because what else would I do except, well, what I’d_ do?

So he did what was normal: walking along steadily, thumping his staff into the dirt of the road with the usual calm rhythmic emphasis. It was only a matter of a few more breaths before they got close to the estate’s gates, which broke that high white wall on the Nile side. The gates were made of thick bronze-bound planks of polished cedar, hung between two massive stone columns painted to look like bunches of lilies—the columns green and carved to look like ribbed stems, the capitals adorned with stylized pointed flower petals, rose-colored shading up to white. _Funny, most of the lilies here have been blue,_ Iaon thought—

Until he was distracted by something going on around him, patterns of nearby movement he’d noted before but then twigged to, as he’d twigged to the shadowing cats in the market that morning. As he drew even with the gate Iaon was about to turn and see what was producing that particular pattern when off to his right, on the river side of the road, a yoked team of oxen lurched suddenly sideways in his direction. The drover sitting up on the empty cart behind the oxen started yelling at someone on his far side. Iaon turned away again, because a certain amount of jostling and disorder was expected when there were so many beasts in the road. But as he did, much closer to him a sudden bout of shoving broke out, and someone stumbled into him.

Except it wasn’t a stumble. From behind him somebody else threw arms around Iaon’s chest, pinning his arms, and a third someone, a tall man in a tattered green kilt, lurched in front of him and was grabbing at his belt. And a cry came from behind him, “Master, _look out—!”_

Iaon kicked out, connected with a shin. The green-kilted man going for Iaon’s belt and purse yelled and staggered and pulled the leg up, and while he was off balance Iaon’s next kick went somewhere much more useful, instantly resulting in a surprised/horrified _whoof_ of gasped-out breath as the unfortunate forgot all about clutching at Iaon’s belt, clutched his own groin instead, and fell over sideways. As for the man holding him from behind, Iaon next let his walking staff fall from his hand, grabbed hold of the attacker’s forearms, dropped to one knee and pitched him over his head. _Pity we don’t have an amphisboena to chew on_ this _one,_ when _will people learn that when you do this to a smaller man his size fights on his side, oh well, more fun when they don’t know!_ Iaon kicked the downed man in the same useful place as the first, watched him curl up like a salted slug, and then spun to see another shape, much bigger, come at him roaring, arms out—

 _Aha,_ Iaon thought, for he recognised this one: someone he’d seen in the market this morning, a tall bulky bent-backed man in a ragged kilt so dirty there was almost no judging its colour. He’d been trying to cadge change-coppers from people who’d just made a purchase. _I was right, then, these folks’ve been following us for a while._ He ducked to snatch up his walking staff and launched himself sideways whilst swinging the staff around and catching the big roaring beggar with it right across the bottom of his ribs. The man gasped and bent double, the wind wheezing out of him. Iaon swept his feet out from under him with the return sweep of the walking staff and went straight over him at the man moving toward him from behind—

Everything started coming in glimpses then; people nearby in the road stopping to stare, crowding in toward Iaon and the several figures in motion who were closer to him, dancing toward him and then away—one of them Tchesmu, who was sort of bumbling helplessly in and out of the fracas, as if he didn’t know what to do. _No, makes sense, better he should seem like no kind of threat, maybe even a little dim-witted._ This went through Iaon’s mind in a flash as he was knocking another attacker’s feet out from under him with the staff and saw Tchesmu “accidentally” elbow an incoming attacker sporting a raised knife exactly as Iaon had elbowed _him_ this morning. When their eyes met a second later Iaon saw just a flash of wicked amusement there _—_

Distracted for that second, he didn’t see the blow coming at him from the side until the last moment, just time enough for Iaon to jerk his head sharply to one side and have it miss him… mostly. Along with the glancing impact he instantly felt that disgusting sliding sensation that came with the top layer of skin being grazed off by something rough, in this case a short thick club with a cylindrical lump of roughened copper clamped to the end—the kind of thing Iaon had often seen used as a street weapon. Then the wound started to sting hot, but not as hot as it might have, _I get it, the face-semblance took most of the damage but it just grazed_ me, _fine, but this isn’t going to graze_ you, _my lad—_

Iaon wheeled, dropped his staff again, two-handedly grabbed the club-weighted arm that was still swinging outward, and yanked it and its owner toward him. Then he seized the wrist and twisted it sharply the wrong way round and backwards, slipped his other hand behind the man’s neck while he was busy shrieking, grabbed him by the scruff of his greasy neck, and yanked his head down hard—smashing the club-wielder’s face into his up-bent knee, and feeling with brief fierce satisfaction that particular soft _crunch_ that meant the man’s nose had just become something he’d be remembering Iaon by for a while. He pulled the man up straight again, kneed him in the bollocks to give him something to think about in the shorter term, and flung him face first to the ground (producing another shriek).

Iaon recovered his staff and straightened, glancing around him for more adversaries but finding none. All that remained were the collapsed and groaning bodies on the ground, and the gathered crowd with the last of the sun catching in their staring eyes. It was over as quickly as it had begun, and a strange nervous silence was falling.

Through it, soft first but growing louder, came the sound of raised voices, slightly muffled: not from the crowd. From inside the walls, past the gate. Hearing them, Iaon knew immediately what he must do. He went staggering over to the left-hand pillar of the gate and clutched it as if he needed it to support himself. There he leaned, gasping. The next thing he knew Tchesmu was by his side, dropping his pack and staff, patting timidly and ineffectually at Iaon, all rumpled and dirt-smirched and his face crumpled into a truly pitiable mask of distress and fear. “Master, master, please speak to me, oh Gods you’re bleeding, please don’t die, you’re the best master I’ve ever had, the kindest master, oh, please, _please—!”_

There came a hollow thump from inside the gate—a massive bar being removed, Iaon thought. At the sound the crowd that had stopped to stare immediately began breaking up, melting away, anxious not to be caught up in the aftermath. People from further down the road were crowding to the far side of it, practically falling off the road’s embankment into the river in their haste to get by without being seen to be involved.

Slowly the gates groaned open, swinging inward. As soon as there was room for someone to pass, out came six of the household’s own men at arms, dark-kilted and in dark green-enamelled bronze breastplates and caps, and armed with the typical Khemish sickle-ended swords. Two of them stared around in confusion at the road, while the third and fourth came toward Iaon, stopping a short distance away as if reluctant to come too close.

“Who are you, stranger?” one said in good-enough Greek.

 _So he either heard Tchesmu’s babbling, or read our clothes right. Good._ “My name is Eperitos Aphëidês,” Iaon said, between gasps of breath, turning his head rightwards so he could see them. “A merchant of Mycenae in Akhaia, I’m—on my way to Aqet for the night. Taking ship to Pikuat tomorrow, heading home. And I do beg your pardon—but if I might just ask the shelter of your threshold while I—recover myself—”

From behind the two household guards another figure came into view: a sharp-faced, calm-eyed man, well dressed in casual white linen kilt and headdress. _Household manager,_ Iaon thought, _or some other rank of majordomo._ “Good evening,” Iaon said, and gasped again. “My apologies, I’m not quite—” Another gasp. "Myself at the moment—”

The majordomo glanced out at the road, then back at Iaon in some perplexity, and at Tchesmu, who was clinging to the far side of the pillar and looking fearfully from Iaon to the strangers and back again. “Sir, are you—” The majordomo spotted the blood running down from Iaon’s head onto the painted green “stems” of the pillar. “You’re hurt. What happened here?”

Iaon gasped “Thieves,” and shook his head and clung to the column. He looked over his shoulder toward where he’d left most of his attackers. “They—” But to his surprise the road had become bare. He turned his head the other way and saw, to his surprise, the last and worst-hurt of his attackers vanishing into what remained of the northward-hurrying crowd, carried off between hobbling pairs of the others who even after Iaon’s rough handling found themselves able to walk when the apparent alternative was treatment far more robust and terminal.

The majordomo saw this too. “You three, get after them,” he said, waving half the men-at-arms in the direction of the escapees. The guards started after them, but Iaon doubted very much they’d catch them. If these were marketplace beggars, they were past masters at vanishing quickly in broad daylight even in the face of close pursuit, and soon enough twilight would also be coming to their aid.

The majordomo was still looking dubious. “But why would so many of them attack one man?”

Iaon swallowed, not having an answer ready for this. “I don’t know, they just”—

But Tchesmu burst out then, sounding very upset. “I heard them as we got close! I was a ways behind, they didn’t know I was my master’s, and they were plotting! They were going to make a riot outside your doors so when you opened up and everybody came out, then friends of theirs would sneak in over the lakeside wall and hide till everything was quiet—”

Iaon turned, looking skeptical and surprised. “What?”

“Then in the middle of the night the people who sneaked in would let in others and they’d loot the place, take all the valuables and the slaves to sell and—”

“Sorry, you’ll have to excuse him,” Iaon said, turning to the majordomo. “He’s a little weak in the head. He hears things and misconstrues them and then he gets frightened for me...”

“You turned around to see where I was and tell me something and they thought you’d heard them! That’s why they attacked you!” And Tchesmu burst into tears. “This is all _my_ fault!”

“Oh Gods,” Iaon murmured. “Stop that now, Tchesmu, _stop_ it, how can it possibly be your fault—!” He reached out a hand to awkwardly pat at the arms that Tchesmu had crossed over his face to hide his crying. “Come on, stop that, I’m all right, mostly…”

The majordomo turned and spoke briefly in low tones to an underservant, who hastened away back into the mansion’s grounds. “You,” he said to another servant, of the several who were standing around him, “fetch a basin and wash-water and some towels, go on, hurry up—”

Iaon noted the omission of anything to drink, even water. Just a _little further to go yet before we’re where we need to be,_ he thought. _Stay sharp._ He turned to the majordomo, straightening a little. “Thank you,” he said, “you’re very kind.”

Then he went back to soothing his “distraught slave.” By the time the washbasin arrived—in the hands of a young household serving-woman who didn’t look eager either to get close to a smelly snotty slave or his bloodied trade-class master—Tchesmu had mostly stopped blubbing. As Iaon turned toward the majordomo, the man looked from his maidservant to Iaon and said, “Sir, if you’d rather your slave helped you—”

 _So that no one from the household will be asked to do it. Because that could be mistaken for a formal offer of hospitality. He either doesn’t have authority to make the offer, or else he’s not sure about something…_ “Yes, thank you,” Iaon said, and reached out for the basin and the linen cloth the maidservant was holding out to him. “Come on, Tchesmu, give me a hand here.”

Tchesmu reached out uncertainly for the basin, pausing to wipe his nose on the back of his hand before he took the towel. Iaon kept his face straight as some of the household staff standing around rolled their eyes and turned away, while the majordomo disappeared inside the gates once more.

Tchesmu wetted the cloth, clumsily put the basin down (its water and the cloth already going grimy from his hands, causing the rest of the household staff who were watching to grimace or mutter and turn away). “Master, what if this hurts, please don’t be angry with me, I don’t mean it, oh just look at this, what did they _do_ to you!”

Iaon leaned against the gateway-pillar again, allowing Tchesmu to tend to him while the household slaves stood around gossiping in hushed voices. They were shortly joined by the three men-at-arms who’d been sent off, now returning empty-handed as Iaon had expected, and grousing about it. “Not so hard!” Iaon said crossly, “it’s not like you’re scrubbing the vegetables! Take it easy.” He grasped Tchesmu’s bare wrist, guided his hand into a dabbing motion. “Like this. That’s right. Better.” And silently he said, _Now will you kindly explain to me what the fuck brought all_ that _on?_

Intent on the wound, Tchesmu’s eyes avoided his. … _I did,_ the God said in Iaon’s head. _Bribed some of the homeless folk in the city to arrange an attack on my cruel master._ _Showed them my back._

After a moment Tchesmu’s gaze slid back to meet Iaon’s. Iaon’s expression must have pretty clearly shown his annoyance, for very hurriedly the God looked away again. _I told them to be most careful, Iaon—_

 _That, what happened just here, that was_ careful??

_But Iaon, it had to look good or it might not have worked! Even without reading their hearts I knew they would do no more, it was simple to deduce as much, and besides, considering what I paid them—_

_Not enough. Or maybe too much! And after you bribed them to do this, then you start_ hitting _them? Paid them extra for that, I hope!_

 _That one had exceeded his instructions. I specifically said_ nothing edged. _He had it coming. But oh, Iaon, you were_ magnificent, _you—_

Iaon scowled his eyes shut under pretense of a moment’s pain, refusing to be distracted by the praise. _And just_ when _exactly did you manage all this?_

_When I was buying the fish._

At that Iaon had trouble not smiling, which told him more about his relationship with the God than he cared to know at that particular moment. But he kept his face grim. _And you bribed them with_ what?

Tchesmu ducked his head so no one else could see, and rolled his eyes. _Oh, for heaven’s sake, Iaon, what do you imagine one_ normally _bribes people with?_

But the God had brought him back the right change from the purchase: Iaon had counted it. _Wait. Do you mean you—_ His eyes widened. _Did you_ pickpocket _me?_

Tchesmu produced a fleeting expression of exaggerated innocence just before crouching down to wet the towel again.

Iaon blinked away a blood-drop on one eye. _But when would you have—_ And the answer was obvious: last night. While Iaon had been sleeping trustfully in the God’s lap. _Wonderful,_ Iaon said silently. _Now I know just how Argëiphontês feels after you’ve been in his pouch._

 _Excellent,_ the God said, coming back up and wiping his face again with the towel, _you’ll have something interesting to chat about next time you’re down at the Slug._

_That is not the point! You shouldn’t be taking our money without telling me while we’re on the road!_

_You’re always telling me what’s yours is mine, my Prince—_

Now it was Iaon’s turn to roll his eyes, so torn between indignation and amusement that he hardly knew how to react. “What am I going to do with you?” he muttered aloud.

_You’ll think of something later, I’m sure. Meanwhile, bleed harder._

_Oh, like I can do that on command!_ Yet the scalp wound did indeed start bleeding harder, and the blood started running into Iaon’s eyes.

 _You can’t. But_ it _can._ Tchesmu kept dabbing ineffectually at the wound as he glanced up, glanced down again. “Master, master, look, they’re coming, someone’s coming…”

And indeed Iaon could also hear the majordomo returning. “…met me heading that way, my lady, and said they’d frightened a man off the back wall. There was already a rope ladder hanging over it, and workmen’s tools and weapons dropped beneath it. The slave spoke true—”

Iaon ignored this for the moment. “Good,” he said to Tchesmu, very cross, “because seriously, what use were _you_ back there?” Tchesmu’s eyes went wide and hurt, with just that shade of exaggeration about the expression to tell Iaon his partner was on the same scroll of the book. “I swear, I’m going to sell you and buy a dog and—”

“Oh, master, please, _don’t,_ you promised me you’d never sell me, _please—”_

“And that is the man, Senebi?”

The voice that spoke from behind them was low and musical, a rich soft sound like water gently pouring. Iaon pushed himself a little away from the column and turned.

Pausing just outside the gate and looking toward him was a little gathering of maidservants and several more household guards, and in the midst of them, taller than all of them, stood a slender dark woman in white linen. It draped her gracefully in a tasteful but plainly expensive style halfway between the Khemish and the Greek—a long tightly pleated sleeveless undershift with a chlamys-like half-cloak thrown over. She wore no headdress: her hair, black and tightly wavy, was pulled back tight behind her head and knotted at her neck, with long shining gem-entwined cords of braided linen hanging from the knot. The expression with which she was favoring Iaon was both surprised and very concerned on his behalf, and somehow he was bothered more than usual by seeing this expression on the face of a woman whom the God felt sure was somehow responsible for the deaths of nearly half a hundred men. For this was one of their two suspects: this was Hypermnestra Danaïdë.

While Iaon had suspected she might be beautiful—she was a demigoddess, after all—he hadn’t expected her to be so beautiful that she might have given Queen Semiramis or even the Lady Xanthe a run for her money. She reminded him strongly of the God’s Muse-mother Euterpe, high-cheekboned and ebon-dark and elegantly haughty in that particular North African way: though Hypermnestra’s skin was lighter-toned because of her northern Greek heritage, and her eyes were missing the crinkle of mischief that softened Euterpe’s austere and noble looks. This lady’s expression was more one of slight weariness. _But she’s entitled_ , Iaon thought. _Because though she may not look a day over thirty… she’s_ how _old?_

Behind him, Tchesmu was staring, slack-mouthed and wide-eyed. “Stop that,” Iaon muttered, and elbowed him, “get _down_ when you meet your betters—” Tchesmu obeyed, holding his hands up in a gesture of reverence as he bent double, then covering his face as if frightened. Iaon bowed to the lady, then put his hand up to his head and winced (not entirely acting: though it wasn’t his own face doing the bleeding, his skull where the club had caught him was sore enough). “Great lady,” he said. “I’m sorry to have troubled your evening’s quiet.”

“If you’ve done so, sir, it seems that it’s only been to do our household a great favour.”

“This is the Lady Emnet,” said the majordomo, “the mistress of the House.”

Iaon bowed to her again. “Eperitos Aphëidês, great lady,” he said. “A pleasure to meet you… though I’d wish for better circumstances.”

“Master Eperitos, the circumstances aren’t an issue at all,” said “Lady Emnet”, coming toward him. “Since your presence here has been part of keeping myself and my husband and our household from being robbed in the dead of night—or maybe much worse! Please come in and let us see to you.”

“Oh, lady, I wouldn’t like to impose,” Iaon said. _But this is kind of delicate, don’t overplay it…_

“But of course you must come in! You’ve saved us from danger. And besides, here you stand still bleeding on our threshold! Hospitality would be offended if we sent you away, whether your Gods or ours were watching.”

“What? It’s nothing, lady, truly, this is—” Iaon reached up and wiped the blood away, and then got a shocked look at how wet and red his hand came away. “Oh, oh _my,”_ he said, and staggered back against the door-pillar again and slid down with his back against it, gasping again.

Startled, Tchesmu gripped Iaon’s shoulders and started trying to haul him to his feet—then hugged Iaon to him with one arm around Iaon’s chest while batting frantically with the other at the hands of the Lady’s servants as they reached down to try to help. “No, no, don’t touch him, _they_ touched my master, they _hurt_ him, _nobody touches him!”_ —

Several moments of pure tumult broke out before Iaon could get Tchesmu under something like control (“Stop it now, Tchesmu, nobody’s going to hurt me, they’re trying to help me,” _I’m serious now, cut it_ out _, you’re just making a scene for the fun of it!)_ while the men-at-arms who were trying to help Iaon had the greatest trouble keeping themselves from cursing the dimwitted slave, and the servants snickered and tittered among themselves, and even the Lady Emnet smiled, amused. “Master Eperitos,” she said at last when Iaon was on his feet again and Tchesmu had quieted down, “now that your guardian’s calmer, do come in! Your hurt should be seen to, and you should take some wine to strengthen you. And it’s just going suppertime; my lord husband will be back from the city soon, and he would wish you to dine with us and let us thank you. Pray come in!”

“Gracious lady,” Iaon said, putting a hand back to the gate-pillar of the threshold while Tchesmu picked up his backpack. “I will. I thank you very much! And may all the Gods who watch over the hospitality of men thank you too.” It was the concrete gesture, and one of the forms of words, by which one who’d been offered hospitality acknowledged its acceptance and confirmed the contract as being in place. “Tchesmu, are you ready? Good, then come along. Step lively, don’t keep our hosts waiting.”

So it was that they passed in through the great cedar gates and down the marble-gravelled path toward the pillared House of the Lilies. First came the majordomo giving orders and the servants hastening to obey them: then the “Greek merchant” with a towel held to his head, and the tall dark smiling woman, she asking and he answering about his preferences for dinner (because of course it would have been rude to ask anything of his business until after food and wine): then at a respectful distance behind them, the scruffy slave staring open-mouthed and suspicious at everything around: and finally the men-at-arms giving the guest’s slave the side-eye and bringing up the rear.

And as Iaon stepped up into the shadows of the brazier-lit portico of the House, he concentrated on smiling and making pleasant conversation with the murder suspect, and did his best not to be distracted as (away behind them in the swiftly falling twilight) he heard the massive gates being closed and barred, shutting them all in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Mau:** (in modern Ancient Egypt scholarship, spelled _mw)_ The [Middle Egyptian](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Egyptian_language) word both for "cat" and for the noise cats make. It's written in hieroglyphics above.
> 
> (Also the Cat Mau, a living sacred animal associated with the goddess [Bast / Bastet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastet) in the same way the Apis Bull was sacred to Serapis (see below) and Ptah. The Cat Mau is supposed to have had specific identifying markings by which it could be recognised, as the Bull did.)
> 
> These days the word "mau" is also applied to [the breed of cat](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Mau) popularly held to be descended from ancient Egyptian cats, though the DNA evidence shows this not to be the case.
> 
>  
> 
> **Bits-of-Horus's-eye-fraction-symbols:** Each part of the standardized [Eye of Horus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Horus) symbol was assigned a different fractional value: see the diagram above.
> 
>  
> 
>  **One of those silver fish with the dark tails:** Almost certainly _Lates niloticus,_ the [Nile perch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile_perch). Iaon is right to specify a small one -- the biggest of them caught in the Nasser Lake have massed nearly 150kg and have been nearly two meters long. As with most perciformes, the dorsal fin of the Nile perch has barbs sharp enough to stab yourself with, so Iaon's concern about getting them off the fish first are understandable. Otherwise (also like most other perch) it's quite a nice eating fish, with a sweet white meat high in omega-3 fatty acids.
> 
>  
> 
>  **The city island:** The present-day ruins of Memphis are only the uppermost level of a site that has been deeply buried in silt over many centuries. Present ground radar studies of the area, along with aerial and space photography of the terrain, suggest that though the original pre-Old Kingdom site of Memphis was not on the Nile, the river moved repeatedly during the millennia -- so that the city in various stages _was_ on one side of the river or the other, and very likely (around the period we're dealing with) _in_ it.
> 
>  
> 
>  **ΡΕα:** 105-a. [See here](http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/numbers/greek/) for details of the ancient Greek number system that produces this result, and also turns "221B" into ΣΚΑβ. (A confession: this numbering system is slightly out of period -- it didn't go into use until around the 4th century BC. But getting the older and more correct Bronze-Age period "acrophonic" numbers to render correctly in most browsers is a nightmare to which this tale's inditer has no desire to subject you. Anyway, in this setting, what's one more anachronism among friends?...)
> 
>  
> 
>  **Serapeum:** There were [a lot of these](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serapeum) around the ancient world, associated with the Egyptian / Hellenic god [Serapis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serapis) and his mysteries. The Serapeum in Memphis was one of the most famous.
> 
>  
> 
>  **Eperitos Aphëidês:** One could wonder whether some of the God's fondness for sly nicknames is rubbing off on his blogger (or else a native bent for it is being exacerbated). This pseudonym is one that Odysseus briefly uses on his own poor half-blind father on his return to Ithaca, while spinning him a tale of how he once ran into Prince Odysseus in foreign parts. ([ _Il._ book 24, line 305.](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%253Atext%253A1999.01.0136%253Abook%253D24%253Acard%253D280)) For both Odysseus and Iaon the name would be appropriate: it means something like "a dogged  fighter, of a heritage that never gives up in the face of trouble or pain" (for "Eperitos's" grandfather in the passage is referred to as [Πολυπημονίδης](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%253Atext%253A1999.04.0057%253Aentry%253Dpoluph%252Fmwn) / _Dolipymonidês_ \-- "Dolipymenos" with the patronymic ending. It's a pun on πολυ-πήμων, "troublesome" or "woeful" in the sense of both causing pain and suffering it).
> 
>  
> 
> In any case, Iaon is such an _Odyssey_ fanboy that the choice of pseudonym seems more or less inevitable -- especially since this one is fairly obscure. ...At least he was too sensible to call himself "Noman." That's _so_ two centuries ago.


	35. Of An Overnight Stay and a House Incorrectly Named

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the lavish Egyptian home of the prime suspects in the ancient world's most notorious serial murders, the Consulting God and Iaon stake everything on the outcome of an undercover operation that will either reveal the hidden evidence they seek, or expose them both to a danger deadlier than anything they've faced before....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Apologies to all readers of this work for a long, _long_ hiatus. (Not a particularly "great" one, either...) But at last we're rolling again. Updates should be coming every two weeks after this. 
> 
> Thanks again to Ivyblossom, surely the longest-suffering beta / β in Heaven or Earth or the Realms Below, for support above and beyond, well, frankly, _any_ reasonable expectation whatsoever.

As the mistress of the House of the Lilies led her guest up into the east-facing portico of the House and through the carved and painted cedar doors that opened before them, none of the accompanying servants spared more than a glance for the scarred, pack-burdened, slow-witted slave who scurried along in his Greek master’s wake, gaping openmouthed at the grounds and the gardens and everything else he saw, twisting his face into near-theatrical masks of comic astonishment or awed distress. Even if any of the hurrying servitors had bothered to look more closely at the slave Tchesmu’s face—and if any had had light enough to see it clearly in the swiftly falling twilight outside the porch or the dimness of the entry atrium—they would not have been allowed to catch the fierce momentary glint of utter exultation that showed in those dark eyes as Tchesmu followed his “master” in. 

From the Consulting God’s point of view, everything was going according to plan, if not better. The homeless folk who’d made the abortive attempt on the estate’s rear wall had been as good as their word and more than worth their hire—exactly on time. His and Iaon’s own apparently-accidental arrival before the gates of the House of the Lilies had been within a minute of what the God had adjudged the optimum moment for it to occur. The little crowd of greedy, clever thugs whom the Consulting God had also hired in the market had produced exactly the effect the God had intended them to… even though one of them, the one who’d brought the knife, might merit some punitive smiting later, depending on the God’s mood. 

…And then there had been Iaon. _Oh, my_ Iaon! 

It was, the God had to admit, genuinely arousing to see his Prince go so furiously, perfectly physical all over his attackers. And it wasn’t the mere violence that the God found exciting. It was the easy precision with which Iaon had enacted it—his response a scalpel, not a bludgeon: business as usual for the healer-Prince whose hands _could_ also kill, but didn’t necessarily _have_ to. Watching Iaon so beautifully exercise that restrained and brutal expertise had briefly made the God grateful for the weight of his worn kilt’s linen canvas, which hid certain physical evidence better kept out of sight for the moment. _My dear Prince, when this case is solved we are going to go into our House and into our Chamber and shut the door, and the things I am going to_ do _to you, O my Iaon, just you wait…!_

But there would be time enough for that. Right now as he followed Iaon and Hypermnestra up that white-gravelled walk, the God concentrated on examining the grounds toward the front of the House of the Lilies, as well as the side paths leading to the northern and southern walls. _The plantings are much as I assessed them up on the heights with the Hawk of the Sun. The view of the walls by the northern gate is_ entirely _too obscured by the greenery there. Very good indeed, typical city-dweller carelessness, and a failing that will serve our turn._

Tchesmu’s yokelish gawping as he scurried along made the servants who saw it look away from him in amusement or disdain, giving the deity-in-slave’s-clothing plenty of time to get better data on the details on the positioning of fishing tanks and water gardens, potential obstacles to flight or hiding places. _Guardhouse against the east wall, but that’s not a problem: no one would choose someplace so public and full of potentially overinquisitive hirelings to hide something vitally important. No planting-hidden follies or lodges in the garden, no secret summerhouses to investigate: only one building needs to command our attention. Good._

As Iaon and Hypermnestra passed through the brazier-flanked doors, the half-hunched figure trailing behind them had no need to lift his head to analyse the incense-smoke wafting up and stirred about in the evening stillness by all the passing bodies. The Egyptians were incense-mad: they’d introduced the fad to the world a millennium or so back, and since then the industries that had grown up around the innovation had done everything imaginable to keep the fashion going. _Only mortals could come up with the idea of getting you to spend serious money on something you’re going to immediately set on fire,_ the God thought in genial scorn. _And this mixture cost serious money._ Sweetness from labanum and olibanum gums, warm fragrance from aloe-wood and sandalwood, rich undertones from myrrh and amber of Ch’in… If the surroundings didn’t get the message across, the enforced aromatherapy was meant to drive it home: _These people literally have money to burn._ Each brazier was smoking with what was easily an Egyptian workman’s salary for half a year. _…And also, enough money to make trouble for you if you interfere with them. Lots of trouble._

Skulking in through the doorway behind the others, the God shot a glance at each of the broad brazier-dishes, examining the blackening on the bottom of the vessels, the accretion of many months if not some years of gum-smoke fired too long and heavily onto the brass to be easily scoured off. _It’s thick. Conspicuous consumption fallen into unexamined routine._ The God scowled and ducked his head to hide his amusement as the impromptu procession paused in the atrium just inside the doors of the House. _If they’re this careless about so expensive a habit, there’ll be others to make what’s going to happen later on work just that much better._

The God followed them in, and once past the doors flattened himself against the wall just past the left-hand lintel, concentrating on not being noticed while “Lady Emnet” paused with Iaon to give him a chance to admire the front of the house. In terms of its design the House of the Lilies reflected, in small, the shape of the outer walls protecting it from the world. Long corridors stretched to left and right, the walls paneled with carved and gilded and inlaid woods. Directly opposite the front doors and the group who’d just entered, folding cedar doors were laid open to reveal a wide interior courtyard-garden crosscut with paved water channels and adorned with tall graceful acacias and willows in massive basalt or alabaster pots, everything goldenly shadowed by the sunset-warmed twilight glowing above. The courtyard was enclosed by the other three wings of the house, the smoothed whitewashed stucco all covered with beautifully executed murals of reeds and flowering papyrus, and pierced here and there by more double-leaved doors, some closed, some open to the slowly-cooling evening air. 

The mistress of the House gestured gracefully around her at the designs on the pillars upholding the carved ceiling and then at the garden, smiling as she told Iaon about the artists who’d done the work and the rarity of some of the plants outside. Iaon meanwhile gazed earnestly at everything she showed him, turning as she turned, all the while nodding and smiling with an expression that made the God lower his head again to hide his smile. The look was like the one Iaon routinely turned on the God when telling him that some deduction was amazing or fantastic… but very watered down. And something indefinable around the edges of that smile suggested to the God that Iaon was as aware of the difference in expression as he was, and secretly just as amused by it. 

…Though it was most annoying not to know for _sure_ what was happening inside that mind. Even through the blurring influence of the semblance the God had _some_ sense of Iaon’s feelings, but it was much impaired, and the further apart they got, the harder it was to hear what was going on with him. _There wasn’t any such problem with the semblance of the Lady Xanthe. Then we were always close, indeed touch-close, when I needed to know what was on his mind. This, though, this might start to become a problem—_

Suddenly people started moving again as Hypermnestra gestured off to the right and touched Iaon’s elbow to guide him down the hall in that direction. As they turned, servants were already hurrying ahead of them down the long corridor, then around the corner. _Bath room,_ the God thought, his mouth quirking with sour amusement. What was now unfolding would be exactly what he’d mockingly described to Iaon before his sister’s visit, the formal welcome to a great house: the tour of some of the more impressive public areas on the way to the bathing and attiring that was a host’s first duty to a guest. _Polite of her to bring him down there herself rather than having the majordomo do it; they must’ve been well rattled by the people who tried to come in over the back wall. Excellent..._

But Senebi the majordomo was already busy enough. When the Lady and Iaon had first come in, servants had come flocking to Senebi from the further parts of the house, knowing there would be orders to be dealt with along with the arrival of guests. Now the majordomo was sending everyone scurrying again, giving orders, turning like a weathervane, pointing one group of people in one direction, another in another. “Those three will need help, find one of the older housewives and one of the younger ones to tend the guest in the bath. You two, go bring in more wood and get some more water heating, thank Bast her ladyship’s had her bath but the guest’s going to use his lordship’s share before he gets here. You, run up to the kitchen and get some of that scented olive oil, the citron or the rose one will do for the guest’s rubdown, no point in wasting the expensive stuff on Greeks, they can’t tell what the scent is half the time anyway—” 

The God, unnoticed, smirked gently at the memory of Iaon in the bathtub, complaining about the God using all his pine-balsam bath essence. _Good that they should underestimate him, entirely good…_ “You, cut across to the tiring-room. The guest’s wearing half Greek and half Khemish, so just pull out one of his lordship’s spare shortsleeved lightweight tunics and a midweight kilt, those’ll be all right for an informal dinner. You four, the smaller dining room needs to be set up for three _right now_ , my lord will be along any minute and you daren’t let him come home and find things half-done, you know how he gets! Run back to the storeroom for the rock crystal vases and the gold-embroidered table runner. The dishes can come in after that. And _you_ , what are you standing there for like you’ve nothing to do? Go unroll the bedding in the spare sleeproom. —Where are you going, are you daft? Not _that_ one! The one in the front.” Senebi shook his head, pointed, turned again. “You two, quick, go hunt out the head housekeeper and get him to give you what you need to cense the dining room, nothing _too_ aromatic, for one thing it’s fish tonight and for another I doubt the conversation’ll be so scintillating it makes the master and mistress want to stay up that much past bedtime. You, get a basket and go out to the side garden, we need flowers for wreaths and extra ones for the table settings, hurry _up—!_ ” 

The servants could wait their turn to be deduced for a while. For the moment the God was busy watching Senebi, taking in the details of him, classifying, analysing. Erect carriage, intent eyes, _an analyst himself in his small way, a logistician, everything in its place and no wasted effort,_ small neat mend down the side of the sharp-pressed kilt he wore, the stitches not perfect but tight and tidy, married but she didn’t do that, _he_ did, didn’t see a point in taking it home or sending it off for one of the servants to mend, _practical, impatient with waste and delay,_ relaxed facial expression, logical and decisive responses to new stimuli, _competent, in his element, trained to this. Possibly the son of a previous majordomo, need more data. Loyal to his employers and alert to threats against them. Not someone whose suspicions it would be wise to arouse—_

Without warning Senebi’s glance fell on Tchesmu. “—and _him_ , while we’re tending to his master for all Gods’ sake get him out of here. What? I don’t care where, just out from underfoot! And before that stick or that big clumsy pack knocks into something valuable! Stow those in their sleeping room and put him in the kitchen for the time being. Get him fed and watered—doesn’t look like he’s exactly been starving but we wouldn’t want to be found wanting in the little details, you know her Ladyship’s way when hospitality’s an issue! And make sure they scrub him down—can’t let him wind up in the dining room with blood all over him and still smelling that way, my Lady’ll lose her appetite! Tell them to dig around in the staff’s laundry and and find him a clean kilt if nothing else…” 

_I beg your pardon, smelling_ what _way exactly?_ the God thought, indignant. But he hadn’t time for much more in that vein, because the next moment a few male slaves came bustling over. Despite Tchesmu’s attempt to ward them off, one quickly relieved him of his pack and staff and the other two took him not ungently by the arms and hustled him down the long hallway that led to the left of the front doors and toward the southern end of the house. _All right,_ the God thought, _so far so good, time for a little more roleplaying._

Iaon was being guided away alongside the lady “Emnet” and her maids, and at Tchesmu’s distressed shout of “Master! Master, _help me!”_ , Iaon turned and looked over his shoulder. “Tchesmu, it’s all right,” he called back, “go with the good people and do what they tell you, I’ll see you at dinner time—” 

And just like that he was gone: swept off around the corner where the east and north corridors joined, with the God left behind like just one more piece of baggage in the process of being stowed. _Well,_ the God thought as he too was pulled away, _even here a slave doesn’t count for all that much…_

Down at the far end of that hallway, tall vertically-slatted cedar doors were pushed aside, and after them a heavy linen-canvas curtain, grubby at the edges from the handling (or surreptitious finger-wiping) of many hands. Through this the God was propelled and more or less pushed into the arms of a broad tall woman in her forties with a round, deeply-lined face _(sun damage, Phrygian stock, hired servant,_ the God immediately perceived, _widowed young, left-handed but concealing it—)_

“What’s this then?” the woman said, wiping the back of one sweaty wrist against her headwrap while the God glanced around him in what he intended to look like open-mouthed panic. He had relatively little experience with kitchens, but this was one of the biggest he’d ever seen: one whole corner of the House of the Lilies given over to ovens and firepits and wall-mounted rails to hang fish and meat and game, shelves stacked with amphorae and oil jars and jugs of beer, baskets of veg and nets of fruit— 

“It’s a slave.” 

—rammed-earth floor packed down hard and swept very clean, broad side-sloped sloped granite dry sinks up against the walls, high small windows open to let the heat out, the whole place fairly well lit by a skylight and oil lamps and the glow from the open mouths of two separate oven-domes— 

“I can see _that,_ no missing the neck ring, is there? Just what do you take me for? Never mind, not like I don’t know. What’s _he_ doing in here, _that’s_ the question, can’t you see we’re working? Hardly need another warm body to trip over.” 

_—only one exit out this side, the door open at the moment for the through-draft, almost always closed at night to judge by the wear on the bar and the holes it runs into—_

“Not my problem,” said the male servant. “Senebi said to scrub him up and get him decent for waiting on his master in the dining room. Give him something to eat and drink first so his stomach won’t put everybody off with the growling.” And the two male servants took themselves back out through the curtain with the air of people well rid of a problem they should never have been stuck with in the first place. 

“Ah, wonderful,” said the woman, “who needs _this_ right now? As if everything’s not mad enough right now.” She pushed Tchesmu a little away from her. “What do they call you, stranger?” 

The God opened his mouth, but already the woman was turning him around and pushing him into someone else’s arms (those of a big brawny square-jawed man with a broken nose and a genial look) as if he was the object of a sudden game of pass-the-parcel. “Aah, what am I thinking? Not like he’d understand Khemish—Greek as he is to start with and a slave to boot. That lot always expect _us_ to speak some kind of Greek so they won’t have to bother learning anything _foreign.”_

The woman stood there for a moment with her fists on her ample hips. “And it’s not like dinnertime’s changed, his Lordship’ll be home before we know it! Get back to what you were doing. ‘Eb, we’ll need more bread! And Fawn, more wood for the number two oven. And where’s that second fish? Good, haul that basket out of the big tank and put it in the little one, and Hooker,” this apparently being the man presently hanging onto the God as if afraid he might bolt for parts unknown, “you and Dash just put him straight into the big tank, nothing else needs to be in there, right? Good, where’s the soap got to—?” 

The kitchen was beautifully equipped with what passed locally for state-of-the-art plumbing. This meant a two-cubit-wide channel that ran through the wall into the kitchen from one side and out the wall on the other, and broadened out in the middle into a square three-cubit-deep tank suitable for washing cloths, or vegetables, or dishes, or passing slaves. Moments later, despite his mostly _pro forma_ and intentionally incoherent protests, and minus his kilt (”Oh dear Set, are _all_ Greeks tackled up like this, you think? Hmm…”), the God was bundled into the tank. There the brawny servant called Hooker ( _very apt, former fisherman, the knuckle scarring from the hooks and the rope-galls from accidents while running out the nets are obvious enough, not to mention the callouses from the knitting-hooks used in net repair…_ ) and his small lean sharp-faced colleague Dash ( _apt as well, a message-runner once, had to give it up though after the knee injury, recommended to the household from another noble house by a considerate employer who didn’t want this man suffering in-house mockery for his change in station…_ ) took turns scrubbing Tchesmu clean with brushes and kitchen sponges and generous fistfuls of a soft pumice-y household soap scented with oil of green citron. 

For the case’s sake and that of his disguise, the Consulting God managed to swallow down his indignation and used this unique event for further observation. (In truth he wasn’t going to put up _that_ much resistance to the prospect of getting a little cleaner than he was. Being on the road had made him unexpectedly miss his long daily bath in his own House—though he could certainly have done without the enthusiastic assistance. He also purposefully turned his mind away from any thought of other events in his own bath, Iaon scrubbing his back for example, because— _No,_ no, _not here…!)_

Forcefully the God focused out the scrubbing proper and started examining the kitchen staff in more detail. Everyone was in kilts, or in the women’s cases kilts and breastbands, more (the God thought) as some protection for their bosoms from the kitchen fires than for any concern about modesty; but then Egyptians were far less body-shy and prudish about physical functions and sex than most other cultures in this part of the world. _And in a place where it’s commonly understood that the Universe was created by the Most Ancient God having a massive cosmic wank, maybe this is understandable…_ Most everyone in the kitchen was wearing a linen headwrap of some kind, plain or in colours, except for a couple of the staff who apparently found it too hot in the kitchen and were happy to let their shaved scalps show. _Interesting, though: the staff are more conservative than at least one of their employers. Hypermnestra’s kept her hair, but nods in the direction of the tasseled wigs that are the fashion here after one’s depilated or shaved. Cultural loyalties divided? Or is something else going on?_

But the kitchen staff’s conversation was what primarily commanded his attention, a priority made easier by them talking right over him as if they didn’t think he could understand them. _Well, they may find out otherwise later, but why rush to jar them out of their preconceptions?_ Right now the God’s business was to assess their reliability as sources of evidence; to work out whether they as individuals and as a gestalt could be trusted to contribute accurate data. And he found himself hard-pressed to sort and file everything into his Palace of Mind as fast as it was coming out of the mouths around him. _A veritable treasure trove of information,_ the God thought, starting to become dizzied by the cascade of data. _How have I been ignoring kitchens? I will never ignore them again._

He wasn’t surprised to find that the undercurrents of annoyance and weariness and hostility and impatience that so often came out when one listened to mortals immediately started to manifest themselves around him. Yet it was mostly on each other that the kitchen staff were exercising these. To him they were being surprisingly kind, even while they were criticising him in a companionable manner over his head. 

“Oh gods, he reeks of fish!” That was Hooker, whose proper name turned out to be Tututef. (It soon became apparent that Neba the head-of-kitchen was the bestower of nicknames: the others insisted on using their proper names as often as possible, apparently to annoy her.) 

“And look at his hair,” said Dash, or Qerti. “Whyever don’t Greeks _shave_ it? Is it something religious? _”_

“I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to.” Tututef made a face but began carefully washing Tchesmu’s hair all the same, his face wrinkled into disgusted fascination. “I mean, really. The _things_ that can live in hair like this. Doesn’t it bother them?” 

The tall muscular graceful young woman called Fawn, who’d been moving between two of the sinks washing fruit in one and letting it drain dry in another, looked over her shoulder. “Wouldn’t he look fine if you got rid of that and put a nice wig on him?” As she turned the God saw wide dark eyes beautiful enough to distract nearly anyone from her unfortunate facial scarring due to smallpox, _age is right for her to have contracted the disease during the epidemic that broke out during the war between Khem and the Hittites; another orphan._ She looked over toward one of the bread ovens. 

Next to it was a small dark thin young man in his twenties who was dividing a kneaded ball of dough into smaller pieces for rolling. “I don’t know about ‘fine’, madam Beq-t,” he said with a faint gasp at the end of the words. _Asymmetrical chest, not a congenital condition, most likely one of the endemic lung diseases, partially paralysed when young, now recovered but some overcompensation on the nonparalysed side, orphaned, parents likely dead of the same disease, yes, double Upper Egypt-typical amulets on that thong around his neck, both much older and with more wear than he could have inflicted on them in a lifetime—)_

“Oh, come on, ‘Ebana. Or at least a headdress.” Beq-t turned away from the last of the fruit and sluiced out the sink with a pitcher of water drawn from a smaller tank upstream from where Tchesmu was being bathed. She fetched the second fish in its woven withy basket, dumped it out in the sink and clubbed it expertly dead with a heavy pestle almost before it had time to gasp. Then she looked over her shoulder for a reaction. 

_—and yes, as I thought, considering seducing ‘Ebana though hasn’t yet worked up the courage to ask him, thinks herself too unbeautiful to dare propositioning him—_

“Might take more than a headdress for that poor lad.” Another faint gasp. The God looked sidelong and saw ‘Ebana’s glance at Beq-t’s face, her dark eyes, then away again, back down to the business of rolling out the first piece of dough. _So. Not unwilling, not at all. But shy on his own behalf—_

“But sweet Horus above us, will you look at his _back?”_ said Qerti. “Poor _huiu.”_ The God ducked Tchesmu’s head a bit to keep anyone from seeing his quirk of smile: _typical mortal behavior—they can’t let anything go five minutes before giving it a name._ For the word meant “one who’s been beaten”. “How could that little man ever have done that to him? I can’t believe S-nekt thought he seemed _nice!”_

“It’s not ‘How could he have done that.’ It’s ‘How would he have _reached.’”_

“Oh no, come on now, like _that’s_ an issue.” Beq-t didn’t look up from the fish she was scaling. “Remember the master’s friend from downriver, can’t remember the man’s name and I don’t want to, one of the crowd they went out on the boat with the other day—” 

“Reshef,” Tututef said, tugging on the God’s hair a little to get him to lean his head back for a rinse. 

“Now you’ve reminded me, oh Gods but I’ll get you for that! The dreadful man. Anyway he’s shorter even than this Greek’s master and _all_ his slaves’ backs look like that, poor things, because he has a special slave just for whipping the other ones.” 

The God shook the rinsing water out of his eyes and got them open soon enough to see a sort of communal shudder go through everyone working in the kitchen. 

‘Ebana the baker pushed one roll of dough to one side and started working on another. “Some people. There’s no justice.” 

Beq-t sighed. “What can you do?” 

Tututef rolled his eyes. “With all the gods we’ve got, you’d think there’d be _one_ with enough time on its hands to smite people like that.” 

“Maybe they prefer waiting till later.” 

“Yeah.” Qerti grinned. “Let people like that onto the Boat of a Million Years as, you know, a joke, right? So they think they’re all safe now, they think they’re in nice and snug with Ra for the rest of time and they’ll have free bread and beer forever. Then wait till they’re in a really good dark scary bit of the Tuat, you know, one of those parts that’s all night with no stars and crawling with scorpions, and right in the middle of it grab ‘em by the hands and the heels and throw ‘em overboard for the _meshu_ -demons in the water. The ones with all those teeth.” 

There was more laughter at that from all quarters, a bit evil this time. But it was the kind of evil that comes of the thought of the wicked getting their just deserts, and _that_ kind the God could empathise with. 

“Madam Neba, how do you want this? What are we doing with it?” Beq-t said, looking up from the fish as she tossed its guts into a bowl. 

Neba came over to look at it. “Young one, you think?” 

“Fins look good,” Beq-t said. “Last year’s, maybe.” 

“Hmm. Well, we’re roasting the other one. Maybe we should poach this. I’ll go out and get some of that water-mint, that’s always nice as stuffing. And some of the blue basil. Where’s that half-jug of white wine they didn’t finish the other night?” 

“Over in the little tank, staying cool.” 

“All right. Won’t be much good for drinking at this point, but if we do the fish in it, at least it won’t go to waste.” Neba turned. “Aren’t you two done with him yet? How long does it take to wash one Greek?” 

“A lot of dirt on him,” Qerti said. But through the last touch or two as the two servants stood him upright in the water the God could hear him thinking, _And what’s the harm in taking a little time to be kind to him? How often does a slave get a chance to have someone scrub_ his _back? Especially a back like_ that, _poor creature._

“Well, all right. He looks better than when he came in, anyway. Certainly smells better. Sit him down over there by the bread oven where it’s warm and he can dry off. I’ll find him a kilt for while his old one’s in the laundry…” 

Qerti and Tututef helped the dripping Tchesmu out of the tank and sat him down on the slatted wooden cooling bench by the second bread oven, then went back to their work, stirring pots or cleaning them, fetching and carrying for Neba and the others. ‘Ebana had paused in his bread-rolling to slide half a dozen new flatbreads out of the oven on a broad flat peel; he dumped them into a basket, then pressed one from the last batch into the God’s hands. “Here, Huiu, just pull it apart. Like this…” 

And with Tchesmu out of the way the kitchen settled back into its routine—cooking fires in individual pits being built up, wine jugs produced and wine measured out, fish being stuffed, fruit washed and basketed. The God sat quiet as he dried off, concentrating on eating his hot fresh bread and drinking the thin sweetish beer they gave him to go with it, and looking grateful and guileless and unimportant while he watched everything going on around him and listened to every word. Indeed the listening was necessary; hour by hour the semblance had been interfering more and more with his heart-reading, to the point where he could now only seem to hear anything by touch. _I made this one a little too solid, it seems. Don’t much care for the results, but at least I won’t need to wear it for more than a few more hours…_

“Is that going to be enough wine?” 

“Didn’t want to go overboard—” 

“Oh? Or maybe you wanted to save some for yourself?” 

“Oh please, _this_ stuff? Way too sour for me, Neba! Much rather have what he’s having.” She nodded at Tchesmu. 

“Not till we’re done, my little Fawn. _And_ Their Nibs well safe in bed.” 

“Not that there’s any counting on _that,”_ said ‘Ebana, “even after hours.” 

The God didn’t glance up, but he was all ears. “Not been that much of that lately, Bakerboy,” Neba said under her breath as she lowered the mint-stuffed fish in its flat cooking basket down into the wide clay poaching kettle. “Small blessings. It’s more in the springtime that Herself has trouble getting to sleep.” 

“It was autumn, though, when Harep… ran into her.” Qerti, scrubbing off a counter, sounded as if he would rather have used some other phrase or form of words. 

Neba stood staring into the poaching kettle with her fists on her hips. “And what call had he to be down that hall that time of night, tell me that! I know he said he was just restless and couldn’t sleep, but why not just go out and walk in the grounds then? No one would’ve cared about that.” She scowled and turned away to a nearby shelf, rummaging among pots and small containers, and came down with one: dug about in it for a moment, though not really looking at it or the poaching fish as she scattered herbs on it. “You _know_ she’d have thought he was up to no good, catching him where she did. He knew the rules Themselves laid down about being near their rooms at night! If he got whipped, he brought it on himself.” 

The God sensed something strange about the quiet that had fallen over the kitchen while Neba was speaking. 

“What I don’t understand is why he should just—” ‘Ebana was fumbling for words. “The beating didn’t hurt him that badly, he wasn’t sick, why should he just all of a sudden the next morning be _dead—”_

_“Hush,”_ Neba said. “It’s not lucky to talk about it.” 

That odd strained silence fell again. 

‘Ebana swallowed. The God could see the sweat standing on his brow, and it wasn’t anything to do with the bread oven; he hadn’t been sweating a few moments before. “He wasn’t _sick,”_ ‘Ebana said softly, as if to himself, and went back to rolling out more dough. 

Everybody went back to their work, gradually filling up that silence again. The God was practically bursting to start questioning him or Neba, but he didn’t dare speak even a word of Khemish right now; it would ruin his chances of learning anything more. 

It was then that an impulse struck him, and the God did a thing that it occurred to him Iaon might have done, were he here. He leaned a little forward and put Tchesmu’s hand on ‘Ebana’s arm; and when ‘Ebana turned to him in surprise, the God looked at him sorrowfully, like one who has no words for what he wants to say. 

To his surprise, ‘Ebana’s eyes welled up. “Yes,” the man said, and put another piece of bread into Tchesmu’s hand. 

And the God saw it all in his eyes as ‘Ebana turned away, rubbing his forehead and his eyes dry with one forearm and going back to his dough-rolling. No reading of hearts was needed. _They were friends. And he thinks they could have been far more. But it never happened…_

Tchesmu bowed his head and ate his bread, noting only in passing that it was really quite good, while at the same time trying to deal with the strange pang he was feeling about the heart. _Another of these mysterious “causeless” deaths. But not in some random place, this time. This time, right here._

_Possibly someone feared he’d seen something he might talk about—_

The doors to the outer hallway creaked and the canvas curtain rustled, and in hurried a lithe little middle-aged woman with a long good-natured face, wearing a wig the tassels of which were braided with gold wire and a kilt that was a bit water-splashed. She was carrying an empty long-necked oil jug. “Oh, Neba, there you are, good! I need another of these, somebody forgot to refill the jug in the bath room.” 

“Which scent?” 

“The rose one.” 

While Neba went rummaging, the bath servant stood glancing around at the others, nodding to them as she fanned herself—she was lightly sheened over with sweat. _Hmm,_ the God thought as she turned toward him, _slightly aroused, eyes significantly more dilated than the reduced lighting this time of day would allow for—_

The bath servant’s gaze came to rest on him. “Oh, there he is! Is he all right?” 

“He’s fine, Aukert. Why? And how’s his master?” 

“He’s ever so nice, Eperitos his name is, he keeps chatting about where they’ve been and smiling at us and trying to say things in Khemish. And he’s worried about his slave. He’s a bit simple and gets upset if they’re apart, master Eperitos says.” 

“You can be worried about your property one moment and beating it the next,” Qerti muttered. 

“No!” said Aukert the washing-woman, “he didn’t do that, thank Gods! He was up in Syene and saw a man beating him, bought him away—” 

The God instantly recognized an opportunity for him to reinforce in these people’s minds the idea that Iaon was both a good person and was telling the truth— _because who knows, that might turn out to be useful in the hours to come…_ He jerked his head up. “Master Eperitos!” he said in Greek that was as guttural as he could make it sound. _“Syene!”_ And he smiled and nodded like an idiot, and purposefully began to weep tears of joy. 

Everyone looked at him, surprised. And out of Aukert now spilled a goodly portion of the backstory the God had invented for Tchesmu, with only a few misstatements that were most likely due to too little attention being paid to Iaon’s tale and too much attention being spent on his Prince’s admittedly handsome nether endowments. The God did his best to push down the wave of annoyance that more or less immediately rose in him at the thought of anybody bestowing unnecessary attention on Iaon’s privates… that being _his_ job. In any case, Iaon might not have much of a gift for lying on the fly, but as a storyteller with a prepared tale to tell he was unbeatable— _for a mortal, anyway_ —and knew how to hold his audience’s attention. _Especially when they’re both women, and one’s a bit older and one’s on the young side, and he’s intent on charming them both—_

The jealousy flared up again and with difficulty the God pushed it down as he wiped his face and turned his (apparent) attention back to his second piece of bread. This was no time to allow sentiment to get the better of him—and anyway, a man who had calmly turned down the attentions of the Queen of Babylon was hardly going to waste his time indulging a couple of Egyptian washroom attendants. The God glanced up from his second piece of bread and was relieved to see that none of what was going on with him had been noted at all. “Well, fine, so he hasn’t been cruel to poor Huiu there,” Neba was saying, “that’s a relief. But are you happy to be leaving him alone with Sati? You know how Greeks are, to a lot of them women are just things to own, just another kind of slave…” 

“Oh, I’m sure it’s all right. He doesn’t seem that kind at all, he keeps calling us ‘madam’ and ‘miss’, very old-fashioned, I think he must have been well brought up. And anyway, how he blushed when we got his clothes off, you should have seen him! No first moves from _that_ one, I’ll wager.” 

“Well, good. Here,” said Neba, handing Aukert back the jug, “that should be enough for any three Greeks. How’s the firewood holding up down there?” 

“We could use some more. The bath room stack’s running low.” 

“I’ll have one of the yard staff top you up from the pile out back.” 

Aukert turned away. “And one thing before you go!” Neba caught Aukert by the arm before she could be out the door again. “Did I not tell you hardly a tenday past about what you were to do about the door to the back hallway after we’ve smoored down the fires in here at night?” 

Aukert tugged at her, looking exasperated. “Neba, can’t it wait, he’s sitting in the bath and the water’s cooling—” 

“He can be sitting in it or _fishing_ in it for all I care! You _can’t_ leave that door open at nights, Aukert. You know the rules! Senebi’ll be furious if he finds it open after hours, we’ll _all_ be in trouble! And if you’re up last and it’s the master and mistress who find out you’ve been careless, they’ll have the hide off you. Or worse.” The God, looking up from under his lashes as he finished his bread, saw ‘Ebana go still again, close his eyes briefly, then open them again and go back to his rolling. “It’s just luck I caught it and locked up the other night before Senebi came along to take the key and check the door. So _make sure you lock it,_ Aukert! It’s not like you don’t know where the key is.” 

Aukert’s eyes immediately went to the wall next to the third of the tiled, raised firepits, close to the curtain that almost certainly led to the corridor in question—the one that would in turn lead to the rooms on the south side of the house, and (if the God was correct, which he almost certainly was) to the southwest corner and the western corridor containing Hypermnestra’s and Lynceus’s private quarters. “All right, all right, _sorry,_ I’ll remember,” Aukert said, and was out the east-side door a moment later, muttering under her breath. 

Neba let out an annoyed sigh and turned back to the kitchen, where everybody else had been studying to pay attention to their work and not the reprimand. “Fawn, how’s that fish doing?” 

“Another little while yet,” Beq-t said, prodding the poaching fish gently with one finger. “Just going white…” 

The sound of sandaled footsteps out in the corridor brought everyone’s heads around. A breath later Senebi the majordomo was pushing through the curtain, glancing around sharp-eyed to see where everybody was and what they were doing. “His Lordship’s back,” Senebi said. “Is dinner ready?” 

“In just a few more minutes, master,” Neba said. 

“Fine. Let me have a jug of that resinated red he likes, he can have a drink or so while the guest’s finishing up with the bath room and we’re changing out the water.” Senebi’s eyes went to Tchesmu. “Good, he looks much better than he did coming in.” 

“Wouldn’t be hard,” Neba said. 

“Got a kilt for him?” 

“In half a moment.” 

“Good. Get him presentable, then keep him here till dinner service starts. I’ll have someone let you know when to fetch him along to serve his master.” 

*** 

And now things began happening very quickly indeed. The God did his best to keep track of everything while desperately wishing that he had time or opportunity to do what he most desired—start investigating the side of the house that Lynceus and Hypermnestra were plainly so eager to keep their staff out of after bedtime. He’d half hoped that in the pre-dinner confusion he might have a chance to slip away and look the area over in what little daylight was left, for suddenly there were three times as many people running in and out of the kitchen as had been in there to start with _(where are they_ keeping _all these servants and slaves? Some of them at least have to be hire-ins from town, there aren’t nearly enough sleeping quarters inside the compound for them_ all…!) But no sooner did he try this than he found how closely watched he was. Any time Neba didn’t have her eye on him, Qerti or Tututef did. Plainly nobody cared to give some stranger’s slave a chance to go running loose about the place. 

So outside the sunset burned itself down to its last embers and out the kitchen’s high windows the first stars could be seen pricking their way through the deepening darkness, and _that_ opportunity was lost. But even with all the rushing about going on inside it was the better part of an hour before anything of interest actually _happened,_ and the God could do nothing—nothing in character, anyway—except sit there and (outwardly) behave himself, while (inwardly) seething with silent exasperation. He had rarely missed the Shadowcloak more, and spent many interminable minutes in cranky longing for the effortless way he could normally just whirl it about him and move where he wanted to, unseen, unhindered. Oh, the results of this case, if it went correctly (which it seemed to be doing) would eventually be worth the trouble and frustration. But right now the God was so annoyed that he wished he had Iaon’s gun so he could while away some of the passing time by shooting holes in things— 

“Yes, good, _finally_ we can get him out of here, where’s that kilt?” Suddenly Neba, who had been bustling about in every possible other direction, was bustling toward _him_. The God lifted his head to regard her with what he judged the most effective mixture of annoyance and sullen nervousness. 

“Come on, Huiu, get up, let’s get you sorted now,” she said as she hauled Tchesmu to his feet. “Qerti, have you got it? And that tunic. Good, we can at least send him out there clean, it won’t be like the one he came in with, you could see his lunch all over it…” 

The God bowed his head, scowling afresh that Iaon had thought of that particular touch to the disguise and he hadn’t, _damn it, there’s always_ something... “Oh stop pulling such faces now,” Neba said, “put your arms up, that’s right, and Qerti, stop staring at his equipment and watch how you wrap that, you’re going to have to wrap this a little tighter than usual so it stays high, you know how Greeks are, can’t wear this down around the hips or somebody’s either going to get all scandalized or all hot and bothered—” 

And barely a few moments later the God was being hustled out of the kitchen again by Qerti and Tututef as he’d originally been hustled in, if a little more kindly. Down the hallway he was propelled, past the now-closed great front doors, and into a room past them with tall slatted-cedar doors of its own, and incense braziers flanking them on either side. 

The room was surprisingly well lit, with iron stands wrought to look like tall slender broad-leaved trees standing in each corner; each “tree” bore twenty-one polished iron leaves, and on each leaf burned an oil lamp made to fit it. All the walls were decorated as the inner garden-facing walls of the house had been, with paintings on smooth white stucco. Here the images were of reeds and papyrus plants and blue and white water lilies, with fish leaping from the water and duck and teal flying over it, while fishers with spears and hunters with cats caught the game. Across the room, broad doors in the eastern walls were flung open onto the paved front terrace that ran before the house. A canopy above them was rolled back so that when the Moon rose, its silver light could stream into the dining room. From outside came the quiet murmur of water running past the house through paved channels in the grounds, and reed-birds cheeped softly in the rush-planted ponds beyond. 

A huddle of servants were clustered around the far end of the long table that occupied the centre of the room, but the God barely had time to throw more than a glance at them before his two escorts had pulled him toward the nearer corner. Here nigh to one of the lamp-trees, in the shadow cast from it by a neighbouring pillar, was a little low stool with a bowl and ewer and towel tucked away underneath. “Stand here,” Qerti said, pushing Tchesmu gently into position into the corner and halfway behind the pillar, “and wait. Wait for your master. Right?” He made a lean-here-and-hold-still gesture with one hand. “Your serving kit’s under the stool. You can sit down later, after dinner, if they don’t need you.” 

“And if you’ve got to go…” Tututef pointed at a wide-mouthed jug sitting around the nearby corner and mimed how to use it. “All right?” 

Tchesmu nodded. “Thoth with you then, friend,” Qerti said, “and please all Gods you won’t do anything to annoy them…” 

There the two of them left him. As they vanished out the door the God quickly turned his attention back to the table, darkly and heavily veneered in ebony. The centre of it was a bright elevated cluster of the leaf-shaped lamps, set at the middle of a long runner all embroidered in gold with words and symbols of good cheer, with figures of men and Gods enjoying their dinners and making merry with beer and wine— _kitsch,_ the God thought, _but of a fairly high order._ The table by itself was of interest, perhaps diagnostic, for it and the rest of the dining room were surprisingly done more in the Greek style than in the Egyptian. Khemish household style normally called for each guest to have a chair with an individual table set by it, rather than one table for all. _Another sign of divided loyalties?_ the God thought— 

“Enough, go now,” said a soft feminine voice. The cluster of servants gathered around the far end of the table parted suddenly and took themselves away, bearing fine light handtowels and golden ewers and basins. Behind them, seated casually across from one another at the end of the table in a pair of carved and gilded chairs, were Hypermnestra and Iaon. 

Hypermnestra had changed into evening wear more suitable to a quiet private dinner—a long sleek white sheath-gown belted with a chain of peat-water tigereyes set in gold, and a delicate near-transparent khiton-like overwrap of linen muslin as light and fine as air. But she could have been wearing rags and tatters or sitting there bare as a bone for all the God cared; his eyes were all for Iaon. In the pure white linen tunic and kilt he’d been given to wear to dinner, and in the mellow lamplight, Iaon looked even more golden than he normally did, right down to how the warm light caught coppery-gold in his disguise’s dark hair. The way the lamps cast their shadows served only to better show off the modelling of the strong muscles in Iaon’s arms, the cording of the sinews of his throat; and the God’s mind suddenly leapt back to that night in the great hall of his Prince’s palace, the glow of firelight on an outstretched arm, caught in those cobalt eyes as Iaon turned— 

The God’s mouth went dry and his heartbeat sped, so that for a few moments he had to drop his gaze and concentrate on looking sullen and bored as servants started filing in with plates and dishes. 

Their hands having been washed, “Master Eperitos” and Hypermnestra had been brought wine in a golden pitcher, and water in another pitcher of glass, and were in the act of pledging one another from goblets of enamelled electrum. _“Khaire,_ noble lady,” Iaon was saying, “and once again, your hospitality be blest.” 

“Guest under our roof, you know you’re very welcome!” Hypermnestra said. “Drink and take your ease for a little while. My lord—” 

“Is here, lady.” The voice was lighter than Iaon’s, and cheerful in a way that to the God’s ear rang instantly false. The man was nervous; the tremor of it overlay the timbre of his voice the way ripples from a light chill breeze run over water. 

As the master of the house stepped through the far doorway the God trained his full focus on him. _Appearance that of a male approximately forty years of age, height three cubits and a third, two fingers taller than Iaon. Light to average build, black hair when grown out, dark brown eyes, small but wide-set, thin oval face, long straight nose, no significant scarring visible, obvious mixed Khemish-Hellenic heredity, some Syriac in there perhaps, hands show no sign of significant labour or of frequent weapons use…_ Everything on Lynceus was shaved in the Egyptian manner that was a commonplace for all classes high and low: his wig was understated but elegant, its ebony tassels tastefully bound and capped with gold. Below his fashionably translucent pale linen tunic, Lynceus was wearing the wrapped white _shendyt_ kilt normally associated with Egyptian royalty, its downhanging inner placket embroidered in gold. 

The God bowed his head to be sure that the little smirk he couldn’t quite restrain was in shadow. _Ego_ , he thought. _But more than that, a sign of ancient frustrated ambition, as encrusted on the man as the incense-fug on the braziers outside. A son and grandson of kings and a king by his own deed—however foul. Yet still so dissatisfied by what he sees as his lack of accomplishment that on impulse he affects the trappings of local royalty just to impress a visiting merchant._ It was a risk to wear the _shendyt_ without sanction from the Khemish Great House, which Lynceus might or might not have—depending on who in Pharaoh’s court knew anything about the truth of the couple’s history. 

But plainly Lynceus wasn’t fussed about doing so under his own roof. _Perhaps_ _because even if the passing guest told someone about it later, it wouldn’t be anyone who mattered here?_ In any case, it was a tell that pointed to a weakness. And Lynceus’s look contrasted interestingly with Hypermnestra’s: bicultural, but in a way more likely than hers to attract attention. _The insufficiency issue again? Or a hint at an imbalance in their relationship? We shall see_. Their presentation as a pair, though, was of interest. Not hellenised Egyptians, who were common enough to be a byword, but egyptianised Hellenes. _A strategy to avoid having too much notice taken of them? Again, perhaps. We’ll see…_

Iaon with his usual indefatigable courtesy had straightway risen from table as he inevitably rose to greet any guest or host, be they mortal or divine, be they someone Iaon had never laid eyes on before or someone he’d met— _Not half an hour since in the bath room,_ the God perceived. Everything made it plain, both Iaon’s relatively unstressed body language and the wet spot on the side of the newcomer’s neck that the God could clearly see even in this light and under the downhanging tassels of his wig. _In too much of a hurry to get dressed before he cooled down, pushed the body-servants aside before he was even dry all the way, in great haste to see if he could possibly catch his wife out here for a word alone where the guest couldn’t overhear… but too late for that now._ All too clearly the God had seen the narrowing of the man’s eyes as their gaze briefly settled on Iaon before Lynceus’s face sealed over into geniality again and he moved into the light. It had been an expression too edgy and intent to make any sense when he’d already seen Iaon fresh from the bath just minutes ago: like a man compulsively rereading a letter with bad news in it, desperate to find evidence that he’d misread and everything was actually all right— 

A quick shiver of alarm ran along the God’s skin at the sight of that expression, but the reaction was edged with excitement as well as a grim satisfaction. Yes, they were in a somewhat dangerous spot here, he and Iaon, but the God knew how his Prince infallibly rose to such occasions. And for his own part, the God could already see the pathway of events before them firming up, becoming more predictable, soon to become even more so with every word their two suspects uttered. _Lynceus Aegyptidês,_ the God thought, leaning back into the shadow behind the tree of lights, _your bad conscience at the very sight of an Argive is clear enough. Soon enough we’ll give you an opportunity to unburden yourself…_

Hypermnestra had risen as well, and she and Lynceus smiled at each other and each laid a hand on the other’s shoulder, the restrained but affectionate greeting of husband and wife before a stranger. “Maf-t my dear,” she said, “what a day we’ve had, our guest and I!” 

_Maf-t_ was the Khemish word for lynx, and inwardly the God sneered a bit at the simple pun on the Greek _lynkis_. _Unimaginative,_ the God thought. _Someone else’s nickname for him, or his own choice?_ “So he suggested,” said Lynceus, and the smile he turned on Iaon now made it seem as if that narrow glance of moments earlier could have been a trick of the light, an accidentally fallen shadow. But the God knew shadow better than that, not to mention the eyes and hearts of mortals. In his present circumstances, he couldn’t read hearts at all well… but within hours that would change. “But come, let’s be comfortable and see Master Eperitos properly fed. Then the whole tale can be heard.” Lynceus clapped his hands for the waiting slaves to finish preparing the room and the diners. 

As Lynceus moved to sit at the head of the table, with Iaon sitting down again on his left and Hypermnestra on his right, the light from the oil lamps on the table caught him more squarely and let the God do a few moments’ more observation while servants entered with vases and censers and flowers. Even in this light the God could see the old habitual frown lines that long anxiety had driven into Lynceus’s face, the wrinkles by the eyes speaking of so many narrowed peering looks like the one he’d seen just now, pinching themselves into the flesh one after another over decades. Yet by comparison Hypermnestra’s face was nearly untouched by time. She might have been thirty-five forever, the face composed, all smooth and unwrinkled. The contrast between them was potentially of interest, but without more data the God was content to file it away for the moment and see how events would unfold. 

The new wave of servants were now moving about censing the dining room with light mealtime scents meant not to clash with the foods and wines: green summer benzoin and mastic of Chios, gum gamboge and rosewood. Others were bringing yet more flowers, this time for the guests. Shortly the God was presented with the spectacle of his Prince wearing a flower crown—a vision he hadn’t ever really imagined seeing and which Iaon managed in his jovial mood to turn into something both ridiculous and a little endearing. _It’s laurel that should be bound about those brows,_ the God thought, _the wreath and crown of heroes…_ this despite his occasionally-stated opinion that no such beings existed. _Except as regards_ him, _of course._ But in Egypt everybody wore flowers to dinner, no matter how ridiculous it made them look, and got anointed. _Oh well. When in Memphis…_

In came the high-end house slaves with delicate glass vases of perfumed unguents. The God rolled his eyes waiting for the anointing to finish, swallowing his annoyance at seeing anybody’s hands on Iaon except his—even if it was just the usual neck-and-forearms-and-feet treatment. But shortly that was over with, and the majordomo, who’d come in to oversee the anointing, was clapping for the servants to begin the dinner service proper. 

That was the God’s signal to start doing what he was here for. He took up the linen towel and brass basin and little flat brass ewer that had been left by the stool for him, and silently made his way over to near where Iaon sat, hugging the wall—a body slave wasn’t meant to intrude on the diners’ notice. 

As house servants and slaves entered bearing more drink and plates and the first courses of food, under cover of their movement the God slipped up next to Iaon’s seat and knelt down to the left of him, his nose wrinkling. The unguent they’d put on Iaon left him smelling completely unlike the way he usually did, of linen and tablet-wax and tea and the newer sharp dark scent of gunpowder. That he should be made to smell like the roses in front of their House initially just seemed silly. But after a few whiffs the God reluctantly started having second thoughts. Whatever the source of the rose oil that the bath ladies had rubbed Iaon down with after he was clean, the God was thinking he might just acquire some for the House. The scent was warm but also dark, and underlying the superficial shadowy sweetness was a clean sharp edge, more like the rose’s thorns than the rose. _And that suits him. Suits him quite well._ Then the God swallowed and commanded parts of his semblance to quiet the Hades _down_ as he realized the scent was also reminding him of the unguent they kept by the couch in their Chamber, and this was _no time_ for that reaction, especially when they’d put this flimsy linen kilt on him, what if someone saw— 

But no one saw, because he was a slave, and who paid attention to slaves as long as they were doing what they were supposed to? Nor did Iaon so much as glance at him, but busied himself with praising the food as it came out dish by dish. The God knew without at all needing to be inside Iaon’s head that his Prince was assessing the meal service with the eye of the master of a great house, understanding the underlying message—the wealth of a household that, while seeming so casual about it, could more or less effortlessly produce such a meal as a matter of course. Out came baskets of the flat breads ‘Ebana had just finished baking, with bowls of dates and figs and slabs of a cool dry local goat’s-milk cheese not too dissimilar from feta. Then came the two fish dishes the God had seen prepared—the roast one crisp and crackling where it had been thyme-brushed with olive oil, the poached one sharply fragrant with the bruised mint and basil that stuffed it, and the wine it had been poached in now thickened into a sauce served alongside. Then came more wine, more bowls of fruit— 

“Wake up now, you,” Iaon was saying to him, and the God started up as his “master” nudged him with one foot. “Make yourself useful. That pomegranate, break it open for me. And tear me open one of those breads. Some of that big fish on my plate, too. Keep me tidy now, I don’t want to drip on this lovely tunic my lord Maf-t’s lent me!” 

The God scrambled to his feet and became busy enough after that, handling anything that would have besmirched Iaon’s hands enough for him to need to wash again. He sometimes had to bite his tongue, though, reminding himself not to respond to Iaon’s banter except as a good slave would—in other words, with instant obedience and not so much as a glance of disagreement. “Tchesmu, no, put that down. Oh for Gods’ sake it’s a piece of _fruit_ , d’you imagine it’s going to bite you? Anybody’d think you’d never seen a pomegranate before. Just twist it in two. Oh don’t be such an idiot, look, like _this_. And what are you doing with that bread, _not_ like that, you’re getting crumbs everywhere…” 

The God concentrated on looking humble and being slavishly obedient as Iaon ate and drank and chatted with his hosts. “…he can’t help it, really, and the last master, seriously I could _choke_ the man, he completely ruined what could have been a very effective body slave. Simply beat the brains out of him, killed his initiative dead. No, blast it, Tchesmu, don’t pour that _there_ , you’ll spoil the whole look of the dish! Honestly my lad, sometimes I think all your taste is in your mouth…” 

The Consulting God, who felt strongly that sauce was sauce no matter where you put it and who had his own opinions about whose taste was where, found the humble-slave act becoming progressively more challenging as he realised Iaon’s good-natured scolding was increasingly made up of adaptations of things the God had said over time to _Iaon_. _Revenge,_ the God thought in annoyance and amusement, _and exquisitely timed—when I can’t say a thing about it. O my clever Prince. Just wait till I get you home, we’ll see who has the last word…_

Yet he couldn’t really begrudge Iaon amusing himself a little at the God’s expense while he was playing his travelling chapman’s role so well. He was coming across exactly like a man of humble origins and a life in common trade who was doing his best to sound more sophisticated than he really was, and (all unawares) failing completely. Yet there was no escaping a certain sense of charm, either—something that made you want to like this funny little man who had to keep pulling himself back from veering into the more vulgar language in which he was really more relaxed. 

And in the moments the God managed an unnoticed glimpse at their hosts—for a slave was meant to keep his eyes down and his curiosity to himself when waiting on his betters—and the God saw Lynceus’s and Hypermnestra’s expressions, privately amused but (they thought) sufficiently disguising it, he knew that they were buying it, _had_ bought it. He rejoiced at that. If they underestimated Iaon, they would do so twice over for _him_. Meanwhile like good hosts Hypermnestra and Lynceus were keeping to themselves what they really thought of Master Eperitos, as etiquette dictated that until the guest had eaten and drunk enough to be satisfied, all matters of judgment or curiosity were set aside. 

Naturally the same etiquette established that only a deeply self-centred or clueless person would either gorge himself in silence or chatter away while it was still rude for his hosts to express any interest about him or his doings. Iaon let the routine go just far enough that his artless blather put him a fair distance into the clueless camp… and then he paused literally between bites of one of the fish dishes, looked abashed, put down the next bite, and (so predictably) quoted Homer. “Um. ‘Conversation is the delight of man…’” 

Lynceus’s table slave was pouring scented water over his hands as he washed up between finishing a serving of the poached fish and starting in on the baked one. “But we wouldn’t like to ask our guest anything before he’s eaten and drunk his fill,” he said with just the slightest smile. 

Hypermnestra laughed and shook her head in agreement. “That would be poor thanks for someone who’s done us such a good turn as you’ve done today.” 

“Master Eperitos” ducked his head, and the God looked at him in bemusement; was it just the light, or was Iaon actually _blushing_? The face-semblance was capable of that, just as it was of mimicking Iaon’s normal muscular responses. But if (as seemed likely) he wasn’t actually embarrassed about anything, did this mean he was able to blush on _demand?_ The God wouldn’t have thought he had it in him. _Another surprise from my always-surprising Prince_ — 

“Great lady,” Iaon said, “turns or no turns, I’m sorry. I’m being so rude! Meal or no meal, lord Maf-t, lady Emnet, ask what you like of me and if it can be told I’ll tell you.” 

Lynceus and Hypermnestra exchanged a look and a breath of laughter. Iaon picked up another piece of fish with his folded bread and pushed his cup to one side for Tchesmu to refill it. And the God in slave’s clothing concentrated on doing that without spilling, because a quick thrill of anxiety was shivering down his back. 

The God and Iaon had previously discussed the generalities of how dinner conversation with their two suspects might go. There would be no way within the bounds of hospitality that a stranger like Iaon could question either Lynceus or Hypermnestra at all closely. The Consulting God didn’t expect to hear much background from them except for whatever prepared story they kept ready for casual visitors who weren’t resident in the area and wouldn’t have time or inclination to check the details later. In any case, interrogation wasn’t the point of this operation—never had been. The whole point had been for him and Iaon to get _in._ Now they were in, and it would be subsequent events that broke this case open, not any subtleties of questioning. “Just keep our cover story sounding plausible,” the God had said. “And if you can, get them to stay up past their bedtimes.” 

Iaon had smiled a small grim smile. “Leave that to me.” 

The God had come away from that conversation not at all sure of how Iaon intended to produce this effect. And now, when Lynceus said, “Well, Master Eperitos, I think our majordomo said something about you heading for Pikuat?”, the God had to suppress a nervous twitch. 

“That’s right, that’s where all this trouble began, when the slave _this_ one’s the replacement for got himself knifed,” Iaon said, with the annoyed air of a man still dealing with the aftereffects of defective merchandise. “Such a bl—such a nuisance! The watch up there, excuse me, _down_ there I should say, were going to arrest me for it until I talked to the ones that mattered and paid off the ones who didn’t.” A dry knowing little smile was slipped in there for Lynceus, businessman to businessman. “You know how it is! Oh, but no, saving your grace, I doubt _you’ve_ got any such problems. Anyway there I was, with a backload of samples and supplies that _I_ wasn’t going to be carrying, I can tell you that, so I looked around me and hired a porter and—” 

And he was off at full speed into the tale of his travels, while Hypermnestra and Lynceus exchanged a humorous look suggesting that they reckoned their chances of getting a word in edgewise at no better than fifty-fifty. The God concentrated on pulling Iaon’s piece of fish into bite-sized morsels, handing him carefully torn pieces of bread to pick it up with, and keeping his “master’s” wine cup full as he watched Iaon breathe life into the idiom about being able to talk the legs off a donkey. 

To do his Prince credit, he _did_ pause fairly frequently—though he made it look accidental, a matter of dry throat rather than intent. This gave their hosts the chance to take turns ever so discreetly pumping “Master Eperitos” for information about himself under the guise of being interested in the news of the places he’d been before arriving in Egypt. Iaon, as if completely unaware of such subtleties, gave them exactly what they wanted in unstinting measure. They found out about his wife (doted upon from a safe distance), his sons (ranging from priceless to worthless), his house in Mycenae (the best on the block, just down the hill from the lesser acropolis and with a _porch_ , the very first one in the neighbourhood!)… and (impossible to miss) his utter naked _pride_ in the level of comfortable middle-class bourgeoisie he’d attained. 

It all came together to give the impression of a shrewd businessman whose acumen he applied liberally to everything but himself. Iaon had taken the bones of the backstory the Consulting God had built and put flesh on them in ways that the God could never have anticipated, all spelled out through contrasts… most particularly the ego so humorously dismissive of those below him but so eager to curry favour with those above; so keenly alight to others’ flaws and weaknesses but so smugly blind to its own. It was a personality that practically begged the listener to take advantage of it. 

And Lynceus and Hypermnestra were nothing loath to do so. “You’ve been in such _interesting_ places!” Hypermnestra said. “So well-traveled a man.” 

The God wished he could snort with disdain. _Flattery… such a blunt-edged tool._ “Oh yes,” Iaon said, and there went the blush again. “From the Cimmerian shores and the Iazyges’ lands to Tartessos and the Isles Past The Gates, not many places the trade doesn’t take us. I saw some stuffs in my lady’s store-chamber back there,” Iaon said, nodding toward the far end of the house, “could very well have been from one of our dyers. Some places still do it right, the old fashioned way, none of that rushed processing that only dyes the fibres half-deep…” And then he stopped himself with a little abashed laugh. “Sorry, so sorry, don’t let me bore you with shop talk! Ask me what interests you.” 

“Did your travels take you as far as Tyre?” 

“They did indeed. Not this trip: the one before. If you deal in purple you don’t have much choice. Bit of a mess in the city at the moment, though, so I stayed safe up north in Sidon.” 

_Not Tyre they’re interested in anyway,_ the God thought. _They’ll let him go a good ways afield and then get him to work his way back to the Peloponnese._ And indeed Iaon wound up regaling them (on request) with tales of visits to Damaskos and Phaselos, of Byblos and Baalbek and Kashkai beyond the Inner Sea, before doing an upsilon-turn at Tarsos (“Just one more caravan crossroads, nothing else there but wheat fields straight to the horizon and not a _single_ decent cookshop in the place”) and heading back in the direction of the Bosphoros. 

The God filled that cup yet again _(oh what your head is going to be like in the morning, my Prince!)_ and turned away with the empty wine jug from Iaon and the ongoing travelogue, only to find that one of the house slaves had come out of nowhere to relieve him of the empty and push a new jug into his hands. Without even lowering his head to take a sniff the God could tell immediately that this was a far better wine than the last one… both in terms of its vintage and bouquet and its alcoholic content: it was halfway to unmixed. _Oh indeed. Someone doesn’t at all mind the guest drinking this much of something this strong, and it’s not just a hospitality issue. Someone_ wants _him under the influence._ Not that he could read any heart at the table for confirmation, which irked the God beyond measure. _If I wasn’t in this damn semblance I wouldn’t have to guess, I would_ know. _Soon enough, though, not too long after bedtime, I can get rid of this seeming and kick off the final act of this little drama…_

On it went, Lynceus and Hypermnestra asking innocent questions that somehow always pushed Master Eperitos toward the more political gossip he’d heard on the road; and Iaon answering, always so guilelessly, spilling out everything he’d “heard”—a king deposed here, a democracy breaking out there, a civil war somewhere else. He treated the news like marketplace chatter, inconsequential except as it impinged on Master Eperitos’s own dealings… so that their host and hostess felt safe to listen apparently casually but with what the God could see was covert intensity, sifting through Iaon’s dross for the gold. 

Iaon avoided recent developments in Babylon except for an offhand reference to the place being unsettled lately due to having “come out in a rash of gods all of a sudden”, and better avoided until things settled down. But as regarded places he and the Consulting God _hadn’t_ been close to, more than once Iaon’s knowledge of current events surprised the God, whose interest in politics decreased geometrically if not asymptotically with its distance from his own sphere of influence. _Just how much time has he been_ spending _watching Westie’s little window in the sitting room? What have you been up to when my attention’s been elsewhere, my Prince?_ And though Hypermnestra evinced only mild interest, more than once he saw Lynceus’s eyes light up at some detail of political skullduggery or backstabbing in the region. 

Not that either of them trusted Master Eperitos’s account unreservedly. Every now and then one or the other of them asked a question that prised gently at the edges of Iaon’s backstory, seeking to reveal any rough spots or places where the narrative didn’t mesh. _Idiots,_ the God thought; _they don’t know that only liars make sure_ all _the details match._ But Iaon never hesitated, and showed absolutely no unease at correcting himself if caught in a discrepancy. It was the very sound of a man much more concerned with the success of his business schemes than the political minutiae of his travels. Also, as the dinner courses started to complete, it was increasingly becoming the sound of a man with much good wine in him, going all _Greek_ and garrulously social. 

Yet at the same time, the closer to the Greeklands that Hypermnestra and Lynceus guided the conversation, the more sparse the details of Iaon’s narrative became. It never sounded as if he was _deliberately_ trying to frustrate them. But the descriptions kept getting peppered with “…But that’s just the local small-town stuff, no interest there…” or “But I shouldn’t bore you with that, halfway to the edge of the world, who cares about such things?” 

And the effect of these apparently accidental self-censorships was to make Lynceus in particular push the inquiries harder. Those lines in his face deepened then, and his brows pinched together, almost pained. When he finally went so far as to pass a comment about the view from the Kriterion in Argos, the God was silently astonished at the recklessness of the revelation. 

Iaon, to the God’s complete relief, reacted only with a slightly boozy blink of surprise. “You know the place, my lord?” And then he waved a hand dismissively. “Amazed you made it up that far. Not much of a city, if you ask me, but then I’m Mycenaean, it doesn’t really compare…” 

Lynceus feigned the same unconcern. “Well, you know how it is; one of the things everybody insists a traveller has to see. We toured out that way some years back, when we were younger… spent some time in the Argolid.” 

Hypermnestra’s eyes flicked to Lynceus over the cup of wine she was drinking, her expression otherwise obscured from the God’s angle; but no alarm tightened her eyes—she looked almost resigned somehow. Lynceus’s face was more exposed. Even in the lamplight Iaon must surely be able to see the flare of interest, almost of longing, in Lynceus’s eyes, giving the lie to the words. _Homesickness? Is it even possible?_

But Iaon appeared not to notice: the wine was plainly slowing him down. _Which might be someone’s intention._ _Hypermnestra’s, perhaps? Has she seen her husband show this response before, and taken steps to make sure it’s not noticed?_

Iaon drained his cup and shook his head with an expression of disappointment that lacked any particular concern. “Never really recovered from the Great War, that part of the world,” he said. “Nothing like what it used to be up there.” 

“Still, it’s interesting to hear how a place has changed.” 

“Changed a lot,” Iaon said. “A lot.” He blinked again as he looked down into his empty cup, like a man who’d lost the thread of what he’d been saying. 

Because it would have been expected of him, the God poured Iaon’s cup full again and then peered into the wine jug as if he wasn’t sure how much more was in it, when of course it was empty. Once again, as he turned there was the wine slave, who promptly handed “Tchesmu” another jug of the good stuff—this time with a roll of the eyes in Iaon’s direction that said _Do you have to deal with this every night?_ And the God could do little besides turn his face aside and grimace in agreement, because the role he was playing called for it. _But seriously, Iaon,_ tonight? _It’s in character, yes, but what are you thinking of—_

“This one slope that ran down from the city to the water,” Iaon said, as if suddenly recapturing what he’d meant to be saying, “all olives it used to be once. Good trees, _beautiful_ trees. But not now! No, they grubbed them right up as if some of those trees weren’t half a thousand years old. Ugly spill of houses all down that hill now, and they’ll be sorry not to have kept those buildings inside the walls the next time the Spartans come through, or someone with fighting on their minds comes up that river again like they did in my great-great—” He waved a hand again. _“—however_ -many-greats-grandsire’s time…” 

How smooth Lynceus’s and Hypermnestra’s faces remained at that, as if they’d never watched the alien ships beat their way up the Inachos from the Argolic Gulf… or as if they’d never _been_ _on_ those ships. The God twitched once more at Iaon’s reference, however glancing, to something that had affected these two so closely. Yet it might have been just as suspicious if he didn’t mention anything at all, in this context. _May as well trust my Prince’s instincts here. Not that I’ve any choice…_

“A long time ago now though,” Iaon said, and shrugged as if it was all of no consequence. “Argos’s a bit of a backwater now. Mycenae runs all that part of the world these days. When it’s not too distracted by local business, anyway. Like Poseidon Earthshaker knocking half the city down, a few years back… or that last little run-in they had with the Cretans. A little too much excitement back home lately, and business won’t do itself; glad enough to get away. A coaster to Hydra, then over the unvintaged sea to Cyprus and Canopos at last. …Sorry, Pikuat.” 

The quickly concealed shadow of disappointment on Lynceus’s face as Iaon’s conversation veered back into Egypt was eloquent, and for the God a piece of the puzzle fell into place. _For a while when they were in Argos, they were Greek, or almost Greek. For a while they were actually happy there… until things changed. Until their guilt and fear and the suspicion of the mortals around them made remaining so near to the site of the murders impossible, and they felt they had to flee. But Lynceus at least has been longing for that backward, uncivilized place where they were happy together, even though it was just for a while._ The God would have rolled his eyes quite hard had it been safe. _Sentiment..._

“And then the caravan all the way up to Syene,” said Hypermnestra. “Not usually very pleasant. And much worse without your slave, I’d think.” 

“My lady Emnet, there you’d be right, all Gods preserve you from ever suffering through the like.” Iaon blinked and sat up straight. “At least this time of year it’s a bit cooler than usual, I’ll give you that. But the flies, and the _food—!_ Never the best on the road, no matter how distance might lend the view enchantment later on. Dry bread and dry cheese and jerked meat for _you,_ and pray great Khepra that wherever they were getting the water was _upstream_ from where they were watering the camels—” 

Hypermnestra had begun laughing into her wine, and even Lynceus’s mood seemed susceptible to Iaon at the moment: his face was lightening. Iaon, seeming to have got a second conversational wind into his sails, began to wax eloquent on caravan life, on days of errant goats and mulish mules, of scorpions in people’s boots and scarabs getting up people’s kilts, on petty theft and daylight bribery and the burden-bearers going on strike for more onions. 

That got their hosts laughing in earnest. It took another two cups of wine for Iaon to make his way southward to Syene, to a meeting in a backstreet dive with a covert murex-smuggling ring, and then to what should have been a shopping spree in the city market but instead turned into the purchase and rescue of a beaten Lacedaemonian slave. 

As Iaon told the story, the God kept waiting on him as would have been expected, adding only the slight touch of weeping while he did it, his face screwed up as if with both painful memory and gratitude. “Oh poor lad, now stop that,” Iaon said, patting Tchesmu as he took away a plate to hand to one of the house slaves. “It’s all over now, we’ll get you home to the City of the Kings and you’ll have your own place to sleep by the fire and your own rug to put over you, and decent food and drink. And no more beatings. Here—” Iaon paused, his eyes actually moist with boozy maudlin tears, and pulled Tchesmu’s head down toward him and stuck a flower from his crown behind his ear. “There, don’t you look fine! And in that nice kilt they lent you. Almost presentable. Don’t know how he survived, really; some Spartan army dumped their baggage train running away from the battlefield, I think, and sure enough, along came the slavers, they’re never far behind in wartime. Amazing he wasn’t worked to death in somebody’s mines or galleys. Well, we’ll do better by him.” 

“He’s lucky to have found such a kind master,” Hypermnestra said, actually smiling at Tchesmu. Pretending to be abashed, the God bent down to kiss the hand wrapped around the gold-and-electrum goblet from which Iaon was drinking. 

“Yes, lad, watch out now, don’t get your hair in the wine. Here now, that last piece of bread, and just a crumb or so of that cheese, too good to waste, hm? Anyway, at that point business was done and there are only so many temples you can visit, so off we went to start the homeward trip. Couldn’t resist that one last temple down on the Elephantine island, though, and that big old temple to Our Lady of the Opening In Secret, Eileithyia as we’d call her, but no, of course it’s Nekhbet for you isn’t it? I can never keep all these names straight, there are so many goddesses competing for everybody’s attention down there, bless ‘em. And then all those tombs all dark along the river there, so old, all timeworn, rearing up like big shadows. And the wind speaking among them, like voices in the night, singing songs you can’t understand… old songs, _dark_ songs. Glad to be out of there, I’ll tell you—” 

The God’s eyes opened wide against his will. _What??_ he thought, and instantly let the linen towel folded over his forearm drop to the ground so that he had an excuse to bend down and turn away as he picked it up, buying himself enough time to recover his composure. He had shown Iaon a number of things about Syene from his own journey there with his dread Godfather, but not _that. I never told Iaon about the voices among the tombs—never showed him those shadows!_ The God was shaken. _How did he know about that? How did he find that out? This is terrible!_

“And poor Tchesmu here, he didn’t care for it either.” “Master Eperitos” put a hand down to the bent-over shape beside him, patted him briefly. “Come on, lad, stand up, you’re well away from that here, it’s nothing to be afraid of. Come on now.” 

The God did, because there was nothing else to be done. He had no trouble schooling his face to look unnerved, because he _was_ unnerved. _What else might he have found out in there that he shouldn’t know about? And how did it happen?_ Had he crossed Iaon’s threshold and somehow left that door between them open afterwards? What else might Iaon have seen through it that he shouldn’t, _mustn’t—_

“That’s better,” Iaon said. “Now, my boy, my cup’s empty, take care of that, can’t let the good wine go to waste. _Anyway!_ Turned out to have been worth it in the long run, met the people I needed to meet. But then after that nothing for it but four boat runs one after another. Elephantine to Thebes, and then Thebes to Karnak, not too long a trip, the Gods be praised, because that was the most _awful_ boat you ever saw, no pleasure barge believe me, taking water the whole way. And then Karnak to Hermopolis, at least the boat wasn’t half sinking, but the food prices, I swear—” 

The God filled his cup again and willed Iaon with all his might to run out of energy and start slurring once more, to get dozy enough that there’d be an excuse to drag him away to their bedplace _right this minute_ and demand of Iaon what _else_ he knew and how he knew it! But he couldn’t do that here or now, _oh this is terrible,_ all he could do was stand up behind his “master’s” chair and act ready to keep on waiting on him, when that was the last thing he wanted to be doing in the world. _I can’t bear this, this needs to be over, Iaon stop it now, just stop this…!_

But Iaon wasn’t stopping. “—wound up putting us off early at Dashur, no problem with that of course, it wasn’t _their_ fault about the camels, so we had a lovely walk down from there to Ibbis, nice market they have there for such a little place, and then this morning the ferry into the City of the White Walls. Some sightseeing this afternoon… “ 

“And then after all that, as if everything you’ve been through wasn’t enough, you wind up waylaid at our very gates…!” said Lynceus, shaking his head in jovial bemusement. He too had been softening around the edges as the wine went down. “Surely some god is testing you, Master Eperitos. But you seem to be rising to the challenge! There were _how_ many ruffians who attacked you…?” 

“We must have Senebi in!” Hypermnestra said. “The guards reported to him; he can tell us best. One of you call Senebi—” 

“Here, great lady…” 

And now ( _oh wonderful!_ the God thought) nothing would do but that the whole story got told all over again, the major-domo describing the parts that he’d seen, Iaon modestly pretending that his battle hadn’t been anything but a marvel. Nonetheless it gave him a chance to watch Lynceus’s and Hypermnestra’s faces shift from laughter to sober admiration. And Lynceus, when his major-domo finished, shook his head and said, “I don’t know what guest-gift could possibly be worthy of such a deed.” 

Hypermnestra’s eyes were somber. “Had Master Eperitos not acted as he had, we might have awakened tonight to find our house being looted, our people carried off or killed. We must give it careful thought, my lord.” 

Iaon shook his head. “My lady Emnet, I beg you, don’t trouble yourself—!” 

“Master Eperitos, it’s no trouble, just common gratitude to a man who’s saved us from something awful! And I’m sure that if we or any of our connections need to be buying purple stuffs in the near future, well, we needn’t deal with those price-gougers in Tyre, need we? Perhaps now we have a source of our own.” She smiled at him. “And some of our connections in the city will surely be interested as well. Senebi can talk to you in the morning about the details of discounts and bulk orders and such.” 

Iaon half bowed over the table. “My lady,” he said. “Your humble and most grateful servant.” 

And then to the God’s astonishment his eyes rolled up a bit and he kept on bowing forward, well on his way to faceplanting into the empty plate in front of him— 

The God didn’t dare wait for Iaon to catch himself—just hastily put the jug down and caught Iaon from behind by the shoulders. A second later Iaon recovered himself and pushed Tchesmu’s hands away and started laughing about it. “I had you, didn’t I? I had you! You thought that was for real!” 

Shortly everyone at table was far gone in merriment again, and the God was giving thanks that the laws of hospitality in both the Greeklands and Khem considered broad practical jokes perfectly acceptable when the wine had been flowing. “I need something to sustain me after that,” Lynceus said, “and surely Master Eperitos does too, we can’t have him passing out all over the tableware! Senebi, have them fetch in the sweets and their wines.” 

The dessert came in nearly as many courses as the main meal: stream-cooled grapes, and melon pieces cut into fanciful flower-shapes, and sweetmeats of dried peaches and apricots in honey, and chilled sweet wines in gold and green and dark rose-red. Last and best was a many-layered pastry of candied palm fruit and candied zizifon berries and raisins of the sun and chopped honeyed dates, gloriously spicy and sticky. The God’s mouth watered at the sight of it, though he took care when serving it out to Iaon to look as if it interested him not at all. 

“Oh, come on, you know you’d like this. He’d like this,” Iaon said to Lynceus and Hypermnestra, starting to sound a bit impaired again as the dessert wines hit him. “No surprise there: don’t think he got much in the way of sweet stuff with the last master.” 

He picked up a piece of the pastry between finger and thumb, glanced up at Tchesmu, and then sighed. “Such a temptation to feed them at the table, isn’t it? Just teaches them bad habits, though. Never mind.” He popped that piece into his mouth and took another, and as he started chatting with Hypermnestra and Senebi about what was in the pastry, the God watched Iaon’s hand drop below the table and secrete a bit of the sweet pastry under the waistband of his kilt, for all the world as if Iaon didn’t know anything about it. Both their hosts saw it, and both smiled: and Iaon started quoting Homer, and when they both laughed gently at him, laughed with them. 

The pastry disappeared, and the dessert wines disappeared, and the already-twice-refilled leaf-lamps were burning low again, and finally Iaon started to slump in his chair, while still trying valiantly to keep up his end of the conversation. “Master Eperitos,” Lynceus said at last, “as the poet says, sleep is sweet, and I think you’ll find it even sweeter tonight than we will.” 

“Might be right there,” Iaon said. “I am _so_ sorry, it’s been a long day. Best I retire, perhaps, for Tchesmu and I have to get down to the pier at Aqet before the morning boat leaves for Pikuat…” 

Hypermnestra looked shocked. “Guest under our roof, no need to be away so soon; it’s not as if we don’t have a chariot to spare!” 

“One of our drivers will take you down after you’ve broken your fast,” Lynceus agreed. “It’s barely an hour from here to Aqet on wheels.” 

“I wouldn’t like to be any trouble…” 

Hypermnestra smiled at him. “No trouble at all!” 

“Well if you insist—” 

“Of course we do! Meantime, Senebi will show you to your room for tonight. Senebi, have one of the slaves bring his slave down to make his master’s bed ready.” 

“No, it’s all right, Lady, Lady—” Iaon’s eyes went wide at having apparently misplaced her name. “—Gracious lady. He and I will go together.” 

He bowed his head to her, and to Lynceus. “My lord,” he said. “My lady. Thank you for your kindness to me. And for dinner.” And then Iaon tried to stand up, and immediately staggered sideways. 

Tchesmu was of course right there to steady him, and the God was very surprised how much of Iaon’s weight he was forced to bear for him. “Noble hosts, I do beg your pardon,” Iaon said with that excessive careful emphasis on the words that the God had often heard Iaon slide into when he was drunk enough. “My knees, they, ah, they don’t seem to be, um, working.” He giggled. 

The God scowled and turned his face away: that giggle was for _him_ , not suspects. Lynceus and Hypermnestra exchanged a glance. “You’ve had a lively day, Master,” Hypermnestra said. “There’s nothing at all to excuse. Go to your couch and we’ll see you in the morning after you’ve had enough sleep to refresh you.” 

“Senebi will send a servant to heat a bath for you and rouse you in time for breakfast,” Lynceus said, rising. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk business before it’s time for you to go.” 

The major-domo waved Tchesmu toward the door. With great care the God got one of his arms under Iaon’s, ducked his head in proper reverence to their hosts, and helped him out of the room in Senebi’s wake and down the hall to bed. 

*** 

It should have been a straightforward business, getting his Prince to bed; but the God soon found that, as with so many other things about Iaon, what might seem simple soon revealed unexpected ramifications. Dealing with the lurching and the staggering wasn’t all that difficult, but the singing caught the God by surprise. It was slurred but cheerful, and the light warm tenor of the singing voice was absolutely confident about the notes it was hitting. This proved both hilarious and mortifying, in that the God couldn’t get Iaon to hush _up_ his somewhat atonal output as they made their way down what was a very acoustically bright hallway. At a time when the goal was to get people to go to sleep, the Consulting God started wondering grimly how _anyone_ would be able to manage it now—especially after having been serenaded with excerpts from the _Hymn to Aphrodite_ set to what was plainly the melody of a dockyard drinking song. _Whatever would Mummy A. say about this, I wonder…?_ The suspicion that she’d find it not only funny but somehow sexy only served to annoy the God more. 

But at last the two of them were inside the front guest bedroom and its door was shut behind them. “Beautiful, golden-throned, awful Aphrodite,” Iaon warbled. Then he registered the sudden relative darkness, said “Oh,” and trailed off. 

_“Thank_ you,” the God muttered, “master…” 

“…And if you’ll wait just a bit I’ll yet find another song to sing youuuuu…!” 

“Oh no you won’t,” said the Consulting God, pulling Iaon’s tunic up over his head and confusing him into silence again. Quickly he got Iaon’s clothes off him (and that little tucked-away piece of sweet pastry, none the worse for wear: the God popped it in his mouth and rolled his eyes in appreciation. _When this is over I’m going to conduct one more interrogation. Their pastry cook…!_ ) Then, because strangers didn’t sleep naked in houses where they were guesting, he got Iaon dressed again in his own traveling clothes, which had been neatly folded and laid aside ready for him by the house staff. 

As the God pulled the travelling tunic down over his “master’s” head, Iaon looked around again, took a breath, and started another song, not exactly in the Lydian mode but at least in its general neighborhood. “Muse, let me speak of Kypris the golden—” 

_“No_ ,” said the God immediately as he laid Iaon down on one of the two low soft mattress-beds with their heads to the left-hand wall; for he recognized that first line. _Sorry,_ no _singing the slightly illegal loves of a mortal and a deity right now,_ bad _idea…_ He turned Iaon face-forward on the bed so that the faceful of pillow quieted him again, got his house-shoes off, pulled the other bed close, covered his “master” up right to his nose with the light linen quilt that had been left folded nearby, and took a few moments to assess the room by the light of the two little oil lamps that had been left burning in the far corner. 

_No doors to the outside from this room. Windows the length of the room just under the ceiling, like the kitchen’s—too high and narrow to escape from easily. No furniture to climb up on._ _No bolt inside the door._ There was none outside either, which had been a relief. But there was no way out of the house from this room except out into that hallway again, and through the main front doors or some other door in some other room. _All right, not so much an issue at the moment for us. It’s everyone else who’s going to be wanting to get out. Inside will be where_ we _want to be._ The God spared just a glance for the simple designs painted from floor to eye-height on the walls—bulrushes and papyrus plants, a bit tangled and abstract, and even in much better light well suited to conceal any tiny peepholes that might lurk in those walls. 

A sudden long snore emerged from underneath the quilt. The God rolled his eyes—though all the same he couldn’t restrain a small smile—and went over to their packs, which were laid up against the wall on the hallway side, and quickly ran his hands over them. He’d known there likely wouldn’t be time or opportunity to secure them himself in this room, so he’d been most careful about the knots he’d tied in the fastenings of the various flaps and pockets. Examination showed that every one of them had been opened, then skillfully retied—though hardly skillfully enough to fool _him_. 

This too the God had expected. He glanced over at the wall nearest the heads of the beds. Their walking staffs had been leaned up there, along with Iaon’s sword in its sheath. The Consulting God went over and got that and moved it to lean up against the wall by the packs: better not have it too close to Iaon’s reach until he’d had time to recover himself a bit. _But with luck, my Prince, you won’t need it tonight. In fact if I can I might just leave you to sleep through this very last bit…_

He sighed, as it was always a bit sad when Iaon wasn’t in a position to describe one of the God’s triumphs from personal experience. The appreciative way his eyes glinted, the warmth of that unstinting admiration, never given unearned but given without fail when it had been—it was as addictive as any drug. _But keeping him safe, that’s an issue too…_

Silently the God went on doing what a good slave would do in this situation—folding up and putting aside the clothes Iaon had been lent for dinner and gratefully shucking off the kilt he’d been given in the kitchen, resuming his own with a sigh of much deeper relief than the scruffy thing deserved. _Won’t need it much longer, Fates be thanked, but there’s still a possibility someone might pop in here unannounced before the house fully settles for the night._ For the time being he needed to stay presentable, and to stay inside the damn semblance, though it chafed him more and more every minute as the need for it faded. There was also still a possibility they were being watched somehow. _Best to wait until there’s much less chance of getting caught going about my business in my proper form._

When the God was finished he knelt down quietly on the bed next to Iaon’s and took a deep breath, assessing and analysing the air. The room had been censed with sleepy perfumes—malabathrum leaf steeped in wine, the bark of shrub chamomile, black olibanum. _Nothing too obviously sedative,_ the God thought. _But effective enough in the short term to assist the weary guest to sleep._ Under the circumstances, though, even stuck inside a semblance, it would take a lot more than that to have any effect on the God. 

He laid him down beside his Prince and settled his head on his own bed’s pillow. He would sham sleep for a while, then wake Iaon for long enough so that they could lay their plans. _It’s just as well he doesn’t start really suffering from a serious drinking session until the next day._ And right after Iaon’s stint as the “Queen’s Poet” in Babylon it was the sheer volume of wine that had left him the worse for wear— 

Iaon rolled over to settle facing the God and cuddled his face into his pillow again with a long deep sigh. Then, after a pause and another deep breath, another of those snores emerged: and another, louder still. The God sighed in affectionate exasperation. 

—and wasn’t expecting the hand that reached out, underneath the quilted throw that hid all of Iaon, and slid around his wrist. 

Another snore. _Too much, you think?_ Iaon said as he drew the God in over his mind’s threshold. _Don’t want to overplay it._

_What??_ The relief at finding Iaon actually in something like his right mind was considerable, and the God felt a sudden rush of admiration at how perfectly his Prince had been playing the jabbering and sozzled merchant. Iaon _was_ somewhat elevated, yes, no one could drink _that_ much and not show _some_ effect, but— 

_Don’t bet on it, my God. When you’re a young officer-and-gentleman, you have to be able to prove you can hold your drink. A lot more of it than your less gently-born command, in fact. And in some cases, more than your superior officers._

_And you held your drink…_

_‘With both hands.’_ Inside him Iaon was laughing scornfully at the memory of an old joke told often enough to get _very_ old. _But honestly, my God, did you really think I was going to get_ drunk _tonight?_

_Mmm… Let’s just say the simulation was unusually precise._

_I actually fooled you, is that what you’re trying to avoid saying?_

_Iaon. I am the Consulting God, and ‘fooled’ is a very strong word—_

Iaon laughed almost inaudibly down his nose. 

The God smiled. _Well…_ ‘ _Unusually precise’ sums it up. Right down to how talkative you get when you’ve had a few. I thought you were never going to stop._

Laughter again. _Well, how many times now have I had to do the keep-talking-and-distract-Argëiphontês thing while you’re poking your nose into something you shouldn’t be? The tactic has other uses._ The God could feel the grin he couldn’t see in the dark. _You did say to keep them up past their bedtime…_

_And as for overplaying it, my Prince, what do you call that passing-out stunt you pulled at table? Thought you were going to wind up_ in _that dish._

_Good. So did they. They’re now sure that the contents of this room are a simpleton slave and a Master Eperitos who’s dead-to-the-world drunk. Acceptable, wouldn’t you say?_

_Certainly advantageous._ But there was still something bothering the God that wouldn’t wait. _One thing though, Iaon. Those stories you told them about Syene…_

_Yes, right,_ Iaon said. _Saw something there I didn’t_ know _I’d ‘seen.’ Not what you showed me before we left. Something else._ He shivered. 

That was all it took for all the God’s remaining suspicion and fear to turn to scorn at himself and concern for his Prince. He held Iaon’s hand tighter. _How did you do that?_

_I have no idea. Don’t intend to do it again, though, I can tell you that. I think I saw…_ him. 

The God swallowed. _My Godfather._

_Yes._

_He’s nothing to be frightened of._

_You say that to a_ mortal? Iaon’s mind was instantly awash with tremendously ironic amusement. _But still… the fear wasn’t the kind I was expecting. It didn’t feel_ wrong _._ He paused, as if not sure how to say what he wanted to say. _I mean, he wasn’t_ bad. 

The God had no idea where to go with this. Apparently neither did Iaon. _Never mind,_ he said. _Another time._

_Yes. Yes. Much to do. Come in, Iaon!_

He drew his Prince in over his mind’s threshold, into the version of thePalace of the Mind that the God carried about with him. There in the moonlight Iaon stood beside the God, glancing around at the upward-spiraling ramps of the foyer’s tower and all its dark doors, and immediately slid an arm around him. _I’ve been wanting to do this all day,_ he murmured as he looked up into the God’s face. _Even for just a day I ache with missing it. Tell me what that says about me…_

_That you’re a mortal of exquisite taste and sense,_ the God whispered into Iaon’s hair, drawing him close. _But that doesn’t need telling._

They held each other tight for a moment. But the God twitched a little: the Work was calling. And Iaon, feeling the twitch, sighed and stepped away. _All right,_ he said. _What now?_

_We’re very close to solving this. Tell me what you’ve seen, and I’ll show you what I saw._

_Yes, how was it in the kitchen? Were they nice to you? You certainly smell a lot better._

The God went hot with sudden embarrassment. _Oh come on, Iaon! I didn’t smell_ that _bad._

_Well, a hot couple of days… and a long walk… not to mention that little discussion you had with that longshoreman, and then the fish… Still, it lent verisimilitude to your disguise._

_And quite right too,_ the God sniffed. _Anyway, they were nice enough. And they told me much they didn’t_ know _they were telling me. Look—_

With a sweep of one arm the God laid out for Iaon the map of the House of the Lilies he’d been building in his mind. The diagram spread out glowing in the moonlight on the white marble floor, and the God knelt by it and reached out to touch points of interest; where his finger rested they glowed a bit brighter. _Doors to the outside grounds and gardens,_ he said; _saw this one, this one, this one. Another should be here—saw it from outside_. _Kitchen wing,_ he said, indicating it as he touched the representations of the rooms lined up along the southward-facing side of the house. _Larder, storerooms, a terrace outside with the household’s store of non-precious firewood._

Non- _precious?_

The God rolled his eyes, for it wasn’t so much the luxurious lifestyle as such that offended him: it was the _mindlessness_ of it. _They burn sandalwood and ebony like they were holm-oak or pine. That stock’s locked up outside the kitchen, near where the spices and incense are locked up inside. Doors here—_ He indicated them, doors that shut away the southwestern corner of the House from investigation. Then the God traced his finger back along the map, around the kitchen corner again and back toward the front door. _Just past the kitchens and the front storerooms, here, our guest room. And a few more doors, I couldn’t get into those—they wouldn’t leave me alone long enough for me to sneak out._

Iaon looked it all over. _All right,_ he said, bending over the map. _Here—_ He traced along the longer eastern side of the rectangle, adding to the lines the God had laid out. _The dining room where we were, right? This space here, that’s a bigger dining room closer to the front doors._ He blocked it out on the map. _And between the big dining room and the doors, a big formal receiving room. High ceiling, gilded pillars, very fancy… thought I was back in Babylon for a bit._ _Ostentatious sort of place._

He ran his finger the other way down the long hallway, past the two dining rooms. _Scribes’ room here, east-facing_. _Big high windows, hard scribes’ cushions on the floor, couches, racks of papyrus rolls, brushes and ink and consumables—just what you’d expect for someplace where my lord and lady want to sit down with the major-domo and do the household accounts._ Iaon moved his finger along to rest on the corner room. _Another casual sitting room just past that. Big corner room, with cedar doors that open the corner out in nice weather. There’s a view of the northern water gardens and the lily pools, big alabaster vases full of flowering plants at the room’s corners, library shelves. All very luxurious, very impressive._

_You don’t sound very impressed._

Iaon shrugged. _Doesn’t strike me as all that defensible,_ he said. _These people rely on their reputation and the city watch and their household guard to keep them safe. But what happens if somebody buys off their guard captain? Or the watch, some night?_

_Or invests in some group less organised, with poorer bookkeeping._

_Exactly,_ Iaon said, his eyes glinting with both annoyance and amusement. _Anyway._ His finger traced the route around the corner into the northern hallway. _More storage here. Household linen, furniture, hangings. On the inner side, a summer room and a terrace, and big folding doors: that whole inside wall can be laid open onto the paving beside the inside garden._ His finger moved on. _And then just past that, the main bath room. Quite nice, sorry you couldn’t see it. Fresh water running in through marble channels from the outside, a chimneyed firepit tiled all over with a place to keep a big copper of water hot. Warm tiles on the floor—Minoan tech again, like ours at home._

_Hypocaust,_ the God said. _Keeping it running’s some of what they need all that firewood for._ He gazed thoughtfully at the bathroom. _Very good._

Iaon nodded and pointed at the next space along. _Tiring room just on the far side of the bath. Robes, spare clothes, drying cloths, bed linens and so forth._ He smiled half a smile, ironic. _And another one just past it that her ladyship couldn’t resist showing me: I think I mentioned. Full of imported silks and brocades and that really fine linen muslin, bales of it. My mum would’ve been scandalized at how they were treating such stuffs. And storing them so close to the baths, when material like that needs to be kept really dry if it’s to last._

The God nodded. _You couldn’t get any closer to the opposite corner down there?_

_No. I was attended all through the bath, and afterward they escorted me right down to the dining room. All perfectly proper, but not so convenient for us…_

The God gazed down at the map. What remained unexamined was almost the whole western side of the House. _Their rooms are on that side,_ he said, running a finger up and down the faintly-glowing, mostly-undefined western corridor. _But we have to find out just where._ He glanced again at the northern corridor. _You didn’t see a door down that hallway?_

_No. Just the corner._

_Strange,_ the God murmured, running his finger across to the door that blocked access to the corner on the other side. _Why isn’t this symmetrical?_

Iaon looked at that other door, tilting his head. After a moment he said, _Cooking smells._

_What?_

_Well, who in the world builds their bedroom next to the_ kitchen? _I mean, unless their kitchen’s a magic one on Olympus where food cooks itself without fire in a little box with a bell that rings when it’s done, and there’s a wondrous metal hood-thing that sucks all the smells away._ Then _maybe you would._

The God scowled and muttered, _Damn it, there’s always_ something! 

_—But you can’t count on the prevailing winds prevailing_ all _the time, even here. And when the wind shifts without warning at lunchtime, the smell of the fish the staff are baking for you, or that roast on the spit—it’ll blow right up that hallway and ruin the effect of all that lovely incense you’re burning._ And _get into the tiring-room where you’ve got all those expensive robes. It’ll take just_ weeks _of airing to get it out…_

The God snorted a single annoyed laugh down his nose. _Enough,_ he said, and stood again, reaching down a hand to pull Iaon up with him. _As usual, my_ _Prince, even through this darkness you guide the light. Their sleeping room will be as far from the kitchen as it can be._ He gazed down at the diagram of the house. _But that door may be as much an excuse to keep the staff out as a practicality. We need to be sure before things start to happen…_

_And how exactly do we do that?_

The God’s scowl deepened. _It’s at moments like this that I very much miss the Cloak._

_So do I,_ Iaon said. _And maybe it goes both ways?_ Because w _hen I was dreaming last night I thought maybe I heard it crying._

The God blew out a breath. _…Also, there’ll be another guest room on that side. As her Ladyship came in I heard the majordomo say ‘Not that sleeping room, the other one.’_

Iaon blinked. _Sorry, I missed that._

_Not your fault, by then she’d dragged you out of earshot. There’s another guest bedroom back there, Iaon. Closer to the bedroom our lovely couple shares, probably much more luxuriously appointed, for guests they rank as far more important. We’ll have little enough time to work with and I don’t want to waste time on the guestroom if it’s of no importance._

Iaon shook his head. _I keep forgetting that what we’re after is no bigger than an_ oinochoe,he said. _Or the pieces of one. How the Hades are we supposed to find it?_

_Iaon, I told you, we won’t_ have _to find it… any more than we had to knock on the gates and ask to be let in. They’re going to show us where it is themselves. In the middle of the night, two hours before dawn anyway, there’ll be an event—_

Iaon nodded slowly. _Around the hour when sleep’s fitful and sick men die…_

_And when the body’s processes are at their least effective, so that one startled out of sleep by danger will react most unthinkingly. One or the other of them will reveal the hiding place. Our job is to be where we can see them doing so._

_Which one of them? And where exactly?_

The God scowled. _I’m still not sure,_ he said, _and that’s the problem… But that back hallway is likely to be key. Bad things have happened to slaves who wandered down there at night._

_Beatings?_

_Death._

Iaon’s eyes narrowed with that particular look of indignation and determination that was his alone. _Seems a bit harsh,_ he said. _And worth putting a stop to._

_We will._ The God drew Iaon close again. _Because of you. You were brilliant out by the gates, Iaon. Not just the fighting, but how you handled yourself after. The way you staggered, as if blood frightened you… that was what got us in here._

Iaon shook his head. _Wasn’t faking that, my God. That’s just what I did the first time I got wounded. Couldn’t believe the blood: it seemed_ wrong _. The shock…_ The dissociation, the unreality of it. In Iaon’s mind the God overheard his memory of the slightly shocked lines from the _Iliad_ about blood running out across someone’s pale skin as sharp and delicate as beautiful cameowork, carmine on white, the work of a skillful craftswoman. And then the pain hit full force, beating with Iaon’s stunned pulse, hot, insistent, very likely deadly… 

The God gulped with the immediacy and anguish of the memory. Iaon breathed out, shook his head. _You never forget a thing like that. All I had to do was remember it and I was right there again._

_Some day I’ll find the ones who did that to you and make them suffer what you did,_ the God growled. 

_No you won’t. I was a warrior, my God. I was doing my job, and so were the other poor men. Most people who wounded me are beyond you punishing them now._

The God scowled. _Don’t be so sure._

Iaon gave him a look. _And who was it told me that unnecessary trips to Hades were to be avoided? Let it pass. That memory’s turned out to be of use._ And he sighed, turning toward the entry to the Palace’s foyer. _So let’s go start looking._

_Not yet, Iaon. It’s too soon._

_But I thought—_

_We need to wait another couple of hours. I’m sure you’re right to think they’ve got people watching the room right now to see what we do. Too many places in here to put peepholes, hard to see them in the dark and I didn’t want to be seen looking—_ The God blew out an annoyed breath. _For the moment, let’s rest. I need to think and you need to sleep off some of that wine._

_I couldn’t possibly—_

_You could. I’ll keep watch. And when everything’s quiet enough, when they’ve sent someone to check on us one last time and decided we’re safe for the night…_

Iaon hesitated. _All right,_ he said at last. _Make sure you wake me._

_I will._

That arm tightened around his waist. _My God._ Promise _me. And promise you’ll wake me up right away if something unexpected happens._

The God heaved a sigh of resignation and annoyance. _I promise._

_All right._

Iaon let the God slip back across his threshold. Not too long afterward, the God heard the first real snore. 

_My trusting Prince,_ he thought. _Soon now… time to earn that trust once more._

*** 

He waited as long as he could. Inside his head the tale of seconds slipped by, one by one, counting inexorably down toward the time when he must at last make the move he’d been so long awaiting. The God spent hundreds and hundreds of those seconds running through possibilities, ramifications, plans and counterplans. Now that he was finally here and had all the data he and Iaon were going to be able to gather, the last moves of the game were finally in sight. 

But as he lay there beside his sleeping Prince, eyes nine-tenths closed against the faint flicker of the little oil lamps burning down, the waiting was driving him _spare._ The peculiar feeling that had been besetting the Consulting God all through this case grew stronger by the moment—the sense that for some reason obscure even to him it had to be solved _right now_. He hated such irrational, unquantifiable presentiments, but there was no ignoring the fact that all gods were susceptible to such. He could hate such intuitions even more because they made it plain that among gods he wasn’t _completely_ unique: but ignoring the intuition itself was folly. Some greater power, Nemesis or even the Fates, was looming behind him, leaning over his shoulder, awaiting his action and its result. Maybe it was simply Themis, just Justice herself, intent on seeing her work done at last for those forty-nine wretched souls toiling hopelessly in Hell. 

The thought made him scowl. _You could put the sword down and hang the scales on the hook for a moment and go do something_ yourself _for a change_ , the God thought. But even as he thought it he grimaced in annoyance, knowing that wasn’t how things worked. It was the business of gods and men to make Justice happen in the world. _Just as well then that I’m better at it than any of them,_ he thought. 

That thought cheered him oddly, and he smirked into the darkness. Yet he could still feel the moments crawling over him like ants, increasingly intolerable, _boring._ _Wouldn’t mind just a quick look around before things start moving,_ the God thought. _A bit of reconnaissance to make sure that all’s as it should be. Maybe a peek down that hall to be sure of the lie of the land, before everything starts to happen. I’ll be well back before it’s time to wake Iaon and he’ll never know what’s transpired. Because when he’s with me, things have to go right—_

That reasoning alone decided him. He glanced over at the sleeping form, so silent now—his mortal wasn’t normally a snorer. _He’ll sleep quite soundly now for a while, the way he always does at first after he’s been drinking._ Even so the God found himself marshalling his arguments for going out as he would have were Iaon awake, for in his mind’s ear he could already hear his Prince tutting at him. _But nothing’s_ happened _yet, my dear Iaon. No point in rousing you when you can have another hour’s sleep. Won’t be a minute…_

He rolled over on his mattress, reached out to the nearby oil lamps and pinched out their wicks. The room went dark except for the faint diffuse silvery light visible through those high windows. _Moon’s on the other side of the house now, heading toward its setting, must have a care in the western hallway…_

The God rolled back again and lay absolutely still, listening with every fibre of him for any reaction, any whisper or rustle of movement anywhere nearby that would betray a secret watcher reacting to the light going out. 

He could hear nothing, absolutely nothing but the beat of the ichor pumping through his veins. The place was still as a tomb. 

_Excellent. Nothing wrong with tombs…_

Silently the God got to his feet and glanced around, his eye falling speculatively on Iaon’s sword. _No. Too much._ But the sharp old knife Iaon had given him to carry, _that_ wouldn’t get in the way and might come in handy. He tucked it behind him into the waistband of his kilt. 

The door to their little room was a hinged one with its own shallow entrance alcove let in from the panelling of the corridor wall—the door wrought of varnished cedar and its very hinges of polished bronze, yet another ridiculously expensive design statement in a situation where a sliding door or even a curtain might have made more sense. The God breathed out in amusement at the extravagance and took hold of the door handle, eased the door open just the barest crack: listened. 

Nothing. Utter silence. 

He slipped out through the door with caution, shut it silently behind him, and peered past the edge of the door’s alcove, perceiving nothing but darkness and stillness. From high windows near the ceiling above the kitchen door, the faint silver of moonlight reflected from the grounds outside cast a diffuse, nigh-sourceless glow, just a few shades brighter than total darkness. 

The God held still for a few moments until his eyes adapted and that dimness became more useful to him. Then on Tchesmu’s bare feet he made his way slowly and softly down the corridor, keeping to the outer wall. Shortly he passed in under the transom through which that faint radiance came, above the kitchen door, and noiselessly pushed the door-curtains aside, peering in. 

The air was warm, a faint glow of heat coming from the smoored-down fires in the ovens. In cooler weather the God would have expected some of the staff to be sleeping in here, but no one was. They were either asleep in the staff quarters across the walled compound or had gone home for the night after dinner was done. More of that faint moonlight seeped in here from the high kitchen windows on the east side, but the God didn’t need it. He’d spent so long in this room that he could easily have navigated it blindfolded. 

Silently he made his way past the domed ovens to the spot by the westward wall where the simple key to the south-passage door was hidden behind its hanging. The God unhooked it and went to the locked door. Unhurriedly and with utmost care not to make a noise of any kind he slid the key into the keyhole, felt the wards engage, turned it; then grasped the door handle and eased it open. 

More darkness, this hallway even less well lit than the one he’d come from. Again he waited for his eyes to adjust; even for a deity used to working through and with shadow, the conditions were quite dim. The God briefly debated locking the door behind him, then decided against it. He’d be heading back to that little room and Iaon within minutes; no point in delaying his return. 

The God stole down the corridor along the inside wall this time, the one with flat cedar-plank doors letting onto the house’s inner garden. By scrapes on the floor or the doorsills or hand-wear on walls and lintels, he more accurately classified the doorways on the other side as he passed them: scullery, pantry, storage for baskets and cookpots and other kitchen impedimenta, a storeroom for cleaning supplies, a laundry storage and workshop. But these were of hardly any interest when just a few paces ahead of him was the corner giving onto the western corridor, the place he was most eager to be. 

Once more he paused, listening, scenting. The air had changed, here. As he put his head cautiously past the corner wall and looked down along the western corridor toward the private rooms, the God breathed in newer, darker aromas; black copal resin and colophony gum from shadowy pine woods, dusky sandarac and storax bark—midnight incenses, subtle and secretive. Again he listened carefully for any sound at all. Nothing— 

Slowly the God put his head around the corner and gazed down the length of the western corridor. It was so dark it was almost impossible to see its end; though there were high windows under the left-hand ceiling-line like those in the eastern corridor, here the diffuse moonglow was even fainter. _Overhang,_ the God deduced. _Terrace along the western wall, facing on the water gardens to the rear, probably running from the bedrooms to just before the kitchen._ _The roof’s built out to support a canopy. Might even be arcaded so that a canopy won’t be needed in the wet weather. Either way the moon’s blocked from sight._

He waited once more until his eyes had time to get used to the near-total darkness. Between the God and the point where it became impossible to see clearly, he could make out four doorways recessed into the west wall, though less deeply than his and Iaon’s guest bedroom door was. The master bedroom and the “good” guest bedroom would be the furthest down the hall, but the two between needed to be investigated as well. 

Ten paces brought him to the first one. He slipped into the first recess, tested the door handle. _Locked._ The God put his nose to the crack between door and jamb and breathed deep, catching the scent of the fuller’s earth used for cleaning garments that couldn’t be washed. _Private tiring-room,_ the God thought, _for storage of more expensive clothes—formals, things worn only seasonally._ However, what was most significant was that the air inside was relatively musty. This door had not been opened recently. 

He frowned, considering. While it was _possible_ that the _oinochoe he sought_ was hidden in here, the God thought it highly unlikely that it would be hidden somewhere that the guilty parties couldn’t see its hiding place every day, ideally both without effort and without notice ever being taken by their staff. _It will, after all, be both the symbol of their union and the one concrete piece of evidence of their crime: literally indisposable._ The two guilty parties would have heard stories about how items that people thought safely got rid of—drowned in the sea, buried in endless drifting sand—always had a way of turning up somehow: lost rings in the bellies of caught fishes, demon-imprisoning wine jars washed up on the strand. The price of foiling Justice was constant vigilance… which in this case meant never, _ever_ letting the murder weapon out of your control. _Hidden, yet also somehow in plain sight. So, not shut away someplace like this._

The God’s conclusion left this doorway available as an ideal place from which to view the interesting little drama about to unfold. In these conditions, once out of the semblance and with his shadows drawn about him he would be effectively invisible, as would Iaon when behind him. Smiling to himself in grim satisfaction at the thought of what was to come, the God left the fourth doorway and moved swiftly and silently along the left-hand wall to the next one. 

Here the eloquence of dust once more made itself manifest. There was actually a thin coating of it on the door handle. _No one’s been in here for some days… so, also not the hiding place._ From checking this room’s air as he had the first one’s, the God caught a faint whiff of olive oil, not new or high-quality; the kind used in finishing fine linens. _Storage for the master bedroom’s sheets and hangings,_ he thought. Catching a hint of another scent much closer to him and running his hand along the right-hand doorjamb, the God’s fingers discovered an oily patch where someone’s hand had rested when last opening the door. _Anointing oil._ Not the everyday stuff used at dinner, but something much more expensive, smelling of musk-amber and myrrh and costlier resins. _Bulk storage for supplies the master’s and mistress’s body-slaves use—oils and lotions and cosmetics too expensive to be left where the less-trusted servants had access, kept here under lock and key_ . 

The God breathed out and spent a few moments just listening again for any sound of movement in the house. 

Nothing. _All right. Now the formal guest bedroom._

Quietly he slipped out of the alcove and made his way to the next door. It was more ornately decorated than any of the others so far, inlaid with stylised bulrush and lily designs in dot-ebony and olive and shittim wood. But to his surprise and relief, the dust on this doorhandle was even thicker than on the previous one. _Terrible housekeeping,_ the God thought, and smiled. _But no complaints from me._

He looked on down the hall. Nothing left to see here except, ten paces or so along, the door to the master bedroom, and then another fifteen paces or so along, the corner where the northern corridor met this one. _This is a better spot to watch from. Iaon and I will tuck ourselves in here and let my shadows hide whatever bits stick out. Close quarters…_

The God smiled a bit at what were now multiple memories of him and his Prince squeezed together in tight spaces, pressed against each other, intent on not being discovered. _And now another one. Time to get back there, wake him, get out of this semblance and put it away. After all, might want it for something another time..._ A peculiar but pleasant shudder ran all down him at the thought of Iaon’s promise about what just might happen to him in this shape some evening behind the closed door of their Chamber. _Who have I become that a mortal can do such things to me,_ he thought, turning to silently head back down the hallway. _That just a whisper can so take root and make me—_

The crash of a breaking jar outside the house made the utter stillness of the moments before it seem deafening. Immediately after the crash came a rush and roar like a sudden wind. _A jar of oil,_ the God thought, _dosed with naptha—_ For someone had tossed a smoldering coal onto the accelerant they’d just splashed onto the outside-the-kitchen woodpile—the cheapest and easiest kind of Greek fire, not as hard to put out but just as quick to catch. The roar of flames scaled up outside. And someone started pounding on a door somewhere and shouting, “Fire! _Fire!”_

_T_ he shock of it jarred through the God like a blow. _This is all wrong!_ he thought as after a second’s pause more voices started shouting outside. _This shouldn’t be happening for half an hour yet!_ But someone had mistaken the time, or become overeager for the payment they knew was promised after this job was completed… or just got nervous, eager to get the job done and get away. 

The cries from outside were getting louder, and there were some from inside too, doors elsewhere in the house now sliding or swinging open. _Got to get out of here,_ the God thought. _But no, too late for that, got to get out of_ this! He began struggling to tear his way out of the semblance and was horrified to feel it resisting him. _Damn it, not_ this _again! Come_ on, _get off me this minute,_ o _nly a matter of moments till they—_

Only the sound of one of those expensive bronze hinges creaking gave the God time to fling himself into the shallow recess of the guest room door and flatten himself back. Near-invisible as a ghost in the gloom, a slim figure in flowing white linen shift and overrobe dashed out of the master bedroom on silent bare feet. She turned sharply left, swiftly moving six paces along the blank wall outside the bedroom. There she stopped, running her hand down the panelling and pausing to press something the God couldn’t see. Though still trying desperately to keep his body out of Hypermnestra’s sightline whilst still struggling to shed the semblance, with one eye peering past the edge of the recess the Consulting God was nonetheless able to see her reach seemingly straight into the paneled wall, pull something out, and clutch it to her close. 

Even in the unnerving chaos of the moment, the God’s mind went up in a great fierce flare of triumph at having been _right_. In a flash the things the servants had said in the kitchen made sense: the prohibition against them ever being in this corridor at night, the reasons “her ladyship” might be found walking out here when she had trouble sleeping, even the sudden death of the slave who was ‘Ebana’s friend. Had he actually caught her preparing to open this hiding place, maybe even in the act of opening it, and paid with his life before he could tell what he’d seen? 

_And if anyone had tried searching for the_ oinochoe, _naturally they’d have spent been most attentive to the master bedroom. One or both of these two feared that might happen… so when they moved in here, they had this secret cupboard installed where no one would look. Right out in the open, but close enough that they’d hear it being meddled with even in the dark of night through the connecting wall. Very clever…._

But all this would be useless if he didn’t get out of this semblance _now_ so he could protect Iaon and himself and what he’d discovered. _Got to get away, still possible that she can’t see me—_

That was when the God realised to his shock that the corridor was growing brighter. Dim light was starting to come in those high windows—a flickering golden radiance, the reflection of the fire set down at the kitchen end of the terrace now bouncing into the hallway off the overhang the God had deduced. There was no way Hypermnestra would fail to see him if he tried to leave. 

He pushed himself as deeply into the doorway as he could and held still, held his breath—for half the time when people saw you it was only because you’d stirred and the motion had drawn their eye. _Need a distraction, just for a second, anything to make her look away—_

The knife Iaon had given him dug into his back. He reached for it. _Just something to make a noise, something to get her to turn,_ he thought. _Can’t let her see the windup—_

But Hypermnestra turned by herself, glancing back toward the master bedroom door as if waiting to see someone, and her face twisted in annoyance. _He was supposed to be following her,_ the God immediately deduced. _Where is he?_ But no time for that. He instantly took advantage of the moment, slipped out of the doorway recess and slid quickly and silently sideways down the hallway, back to the wall, making for the next doorway-recess, watching her— 

From the kitchen came a sound of a door thrown open and many feet pounding in. _Not good,_ the God thought, freezing again, as Hypermnestra’s head snapped around at the sound of them, _no way out—!_

She saw him. Her eyes widened first, then narrowed in fear and fury. “To me,” she cried to the people approaching, “guards, to me, _hurry!”_

As the first two of them came around the corner, swords out, and Hypermnestra shouted _“Take him!”,_ the God was already flinging himself down the hallway toward them. _Impetus counts, still dim in here for them if they’ve come in here past that fire and lost their night vision, not impossible to win past them and then all I need is a few minutes in a room with a door that locks to get out of this semblance and back into my power again—_ He clubbed the unhelmeted first of them to the ground with hands gripped together and kick-swept the legs out from under the second, at the same time just registering a quick downward flurry of white behind him, _what was that? No time now—_ He ducked to snatch up the sickle-ended sword that had fallen out of the first one’s hands, kicked the second guard’s blade further down into the corridor’s dimness and stomped on his sword arm hard between wrist and elbow, felt both bones snap, _greenstick fracture at the very least,_ and the scream seemed to confirm it, _good, come on,_ impetus _, keep_ going— 

The third and fourth had seen what happened to their mates and were readier for him. All of them were in light city-duty armour like the ones he’d seen at the gates earlier, though not all fully armed, _no time, genuinely caught by surprise, sloppy after this afternoon’s attempt, their commander should be fired, probably will be, never mind because it’ll be be harder to punch through them every second,_ impetus— Neither of the next two was fully ready or able to engage him in this darkness and the God knew he was worth any five of these poor idiots as a swordsman. He beat down the sword of the man on his right with big swashing blows and knocked it right out of his hands, shouldered the man with stunning force into the corridor wall, braced himself against the edges of the storage-room door alcove behind him, jackknifed himself up and with both feet kicked the left-hand guard so hard into the far wall that his head snapped back into the wall and even through the helmet the impact left him out cold before he hit the floor. The God landed on his feet again and instantly whirled on the next assailants. _Impetus, impetus, keep going, only three, four… no, five,_ six _of them left—not good, not_ good— 

Up came the next couple, _lucky it’s not more of them at once, the corridor’s not wide enough for them to work in melee and anyway they’re used to working in ranks, pity it leaves them unprepared for someone used to thinking outside the phalanx, a_ nd the God feinted left and dodged right and flipped his sword into his nondominant hand and clubbed the guard coming at him from the left in the skull with the hilt, right above the ear, helmet or no helmet down he went, then immediately elbowed the one on the right in the sternum, _ow,_ his bowing arm would be having words with him about that in the morning but no time for that now— 

He was getting out of breath but there was no time to spare as the next two came up and got right in his face with their swords so he was having to hold both their blades away from his throat at once and he couldn’t tell what was going on outside of his peripheral vision, no one had his back here, _stupid,_ stupid, _should have ditched the semblance before leaving that room, too late now,_ and it was just a matter of time before one or two of them got behind him, _Iaon, not that I didn’t miss you before but this would_ really _be the moment for you to turn up—!_

—which was when it happened: the timing going just that little bit wrong, the reaching arm hooking into his free one during the second or two it wasn’t in action pulling someone off-balance, the follow-up yank that took the God off balance in turn, his sword arm flailing, someone grabbing his wrist, then stepping around the far side of him to bend the elbow of his sword arm back so that he had no choice but to drop the sword (with a grunt of pain that he couldn’t quite stifle) or have the arm broken. And then the other arm got caught in someone’s iron grip and no matter how the God struggled he couldn’t wriggle out of it or get his legs bent under him properly to find leverage for a throw, and with both arms out of commission he had no way to shield himself against the blows that started raining onto his head, the blinding flashes of pain on one side, on the other, he staggered— 

“No, no, stop it, that’s enough, I want him conscious. Bring him here!” 

Willy-nilly he was dragged back down the hall to where Hypermnestra stood, holding the sword that he’d kicked away from one of the first two to attack her. The God pretended to stare at it in dazed terror (not that the dazed part was much of a challenge for the moment) while noting, past the sword and up against the wall, what appeared to be her white wrap, apparently accidentally fallen there in a soft, slumped pile. But there was nothing accidental about it. Under it was the _oinochoe_ , hidden from not just his sight but the guards’. The God immediately averted his eyes as Hypermnestra handed the sword to one of them and stepped closer, peering at him in the dimness—now fading again as staff outside got busy extinguishing the fire by the kitchen. 

The guards yanked the up God straight, and one of them pulled the sheathed knife out of the back of his kilt’s waistband, handed it to Hypermnestra. “Well, well,” she said, turning it over in her hands, glancing from it to the God with a scornful, amused expression. “Slaves with knives? Never a good idea except in the kitchen.” She tucked it in her night-shift’s girdle. “And who’d ever have thought you could fight like that? Not much sign of it outside the gates when your master was in trouble, they say. Maybe you’re not as fond of him as he thinks you are.” Her eyes narrowed. “But whatever were _you_ up to out here? Sleepwalking perhaps? Such an awful habit. We’ll cure you of that quick enough.” 

A new shadow came hurrying out of the master bedroom and down the corridor toward them: Lynceus, scalp-shaven and wigless, in a plain white night kilt. “Emnet, what’s going on, why are you still here, we have to get outside—!” 

“And where’ve you been?” The query might have seemed mild but the God wasn’t deceived: plainly Lynceus was going to be feeling the edge of her tongue when the hired help had been sent on their way. “Are you all right?” 

“Yes, fine, but come on, we should get out now!” 

“No need, husband. Can’t you hear? The fires are half out already. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Just see what I caught snooping around!” 

Lynceus turned that narrow-eyed look on Tchesmu. ”Where’s his master?” 

“Dead drunk and sound asleep,” Hypermnestra said. “Before I covered the light and sent Anpu off for the night, I had her check. But this one couldn’t stay in bed, it seems.” She turned back toward the God. “Got caught short? Or something else? Heard something outside the room, perhaps?” 

The God held his peace and struggled, but it was no use. _I was right about the peepholes. Not that it does me much good at the moment—_

“But that doesn’t matter either,” Hypermnestra said, amused. She glanced at Lynceus. “Go get what’s on the table by the couch. And bring that light.” 

Lynceus threw his wife a peculiar look, but vanished back toward the bedroom. The God refused to even glance at the covered _oinochoe_. There was still a possibility that he could get himself out of this, get Iaon out of it, and he didn’t dare draw Hypermnestra’s attention to the reason they’d come. She’d find somewhere else to hide it, no one would ever find it again— 

_Iaon,_ the God thought. _Iaon! Wake up!_ But right now, when he’d been stuck in the semblance so long, without actually touching Iaon there was no hope of reaching him along that unpredictable and intangible linkage that had been growing up between them. 

The God’s heart was hammering. He strove to calm himself. He’d been in spots this tight before and broken out of them despite his captors’ best efforts. _Just relax for the moment. Let things unfold. She’s showing all the signs of being a gloater. Let her think she’s in control, let the men holding you think you’re too weak or frightened to put up a fight—_

The God sagged, made them work a little to hold him up, and put on a face of growing fear. “Master Eperitos!” he whimpered. 

Hypermnestra gazed at him with amusement. “I don’t think he’s going to be able to get you out of trouble this time,” she said. She glanced at the guards. “Bind him hand and foot.” 

The God struggled again to break free, but it was useless and won him nothing but a punch in the stomach. He doubled over, choking and gasping for breath, while someone fetched braided linen rope from one of the nearby storerooms and pulled his arms behind him, binding him fast. The God strained against the binding to try to keep it from being as tight as it might be, channeling his fury at himself into the effort. But the guards overrode his efforts, one pushing his hands together, another tying the knots. Then they shoved him down into a kneeling position and knotted his ankles together, finally threading a third piece of rope through the two bindings and tying them together. 

“There now, that’s where you belong,” Hypermnestra said, almost cheerfully. “On your knees. A good place for a slave to start, and a good place to finish.” She smiled a secret smile. “Just lean him sideways against the wall here. —So.” She waved the guards away. “Now go help them outside with getting those fires put out. And while you’re at it pick up the poor fools this one knocked over and take them back to the guardhouse to get patched up. Then a couple of you go fetch slavey’s little master back here and we’ll sort him out too.” 

“Lady, what if the Greek resists?” 

Hypermnestra shrugged. “Well, goodness, if in the middle of the night he tries to tangle with the household guard in a place where he’s a guest—especially as drunk as he was—who’s going to be surprised if there’s an accident? It hardly matters. Go on, don’t stand about looking helpless, I’ve got things to manage here…!” 

The guards hastened off, while in a flash of fury and fear the God realised yet another error he’d made, and the depth of it. That face of Hypermnestra’s was not unlined from any innocence. It was unmarked because the woman who wore it was completely untroubled by any thought of murder in her present or her past, or by any thought of what she’d been involved in… forty-nine brothers-in-law slaughtered, forty-nine sisters in Hell. _Lynceus is merely an accomplice._ She’s _the mover behind the murders, the intent of the deed was hers—_

It was hard to keep silent, to not break his cover while she might still reveal something of use, but the God forced himself. Hypermnestra, meanwhile, stood there looking down at him in perfect unconcern, toying with the knife in her belt: then knelt down in front of him. “As it turns out,” she said softly, almost conspiratorially, “I had a little surprise preparing for you and your master… a guest gift, you might say. Maybe not the kind he was expecting, I’ll grant you. But he brought it on himself, didn’t he? He said a little too much at dinner. He does love to hear himself _talk_.” Hypermnestra was amused. “Don’t think I care to have him talking about us all the way from here to Mycenae, though! There are people who might take notice… and we like our quiet life.” 

She looked thoughtful for a moment. “This whole trip’s been unlucky for him, hasn’t it? Despite all his secret deals and undercover doings. That other slave gets knifed, then the two of you get attacked on the road…” Hypermnestra shook her head in fake concern, her smile cold and wicked in the dimming fire-glimmer coming in the high windows. “And maybe it’s going to keep on being unlucky, even after we put you on the boat to Pikuat in the morning! Just imagine. You catch your boat to Cypros and make it halfway across the Inner Sea, and then something unexpected happens—a swell, a bit of wind—and he falls overboard.” 

Hypermnestra’s eyebrows went up. “Or, wait, I know! Maybe you’re a poor sailor, and when he’s leaning against the rail nearby, you stagger away from being sick and push into him, a complete accident. Over he goes! And then you go over the side after him to try to save him. But you don’t come up, either of you! Such a shame, really. The sea’s such a dangerous place, even for Greeks.” 

The God’s gaze flicked past her to the little light bobbing toward them along the corridor. Lynceus was returning with a lamp in one hand and a one-handled jug in the other. 

And suddenly the God knew exactly what was about to happen. _Iaon. Oh no—_

If his heart had been hammering before, now it was halfway to pounding its way out of his chest. But he held himself still, stayed focused, because this, _this_ was life or death for both of them. Even from here, even mixed with a different wine, as Lynceus approached he could catch the unique scent he had picked up from the shattered wedding crockery in the tombs south of Argos… much stronger, now, and fresh. It was the final piece of evidence, the crucial one that proved the Danaïds’ innocence—the one that would crack the case open beyond any possible doubt. 

_Always assuming I survive—_

The God could feel just a little give in the bindings. _Just the barest chance. Chin her before Lynceus gets close, all the initiative’s with her, get that knife with your_ teeth _if you have to, flip it, grab it, cut yourself free—_ He surged up desperately to headbutt her, but without a second’s hesitation and with a demigoddess’s strength Hypermnestra backhanded the God across the face and his head smashed sideways into the wall, right onto one of the places where it had been struck. He cried out in anguish, unable to prevent himself. 

Before the God could recover Lynceus was kneeling down by him, the jug pushed safely out of the way. Lynceus grabbed the God by his hair, pulling him upright, yanking his head back. The God shook his head savagely, trying to get loose. 

“None of that, now,” Hypermnestra said. “You’re just going to be a good boy and take your medicine.” She gripped his face to turn it toward her— 

—and a second later snatched her hand back as if burned, her face turning for a moment into a wide-eyed open-mouthed shadow-mask of shock and fear. 

The God gulped. _She knows_. 

Lynceus stared at her. “What?” 

_“You,”_ she whispered. 

“What? Emnet, who _is_ he?” 

_“What_ is he, you mean,” she said. “Lynkë, he’s a god!” 

Lynceus’s eyes went wide. “Are you sure—” 

“My mother was a _goddess_ , you think I don’t know what a god’s touch is like? That burning. So sweet.” She scowled at him, rubbing her hand as if it had touched something she wished she could rub off, but couldn’t. 

“But he doesn’t look, you know…” 

“Of course there’s no godlight, it won’t show through what he’s wearing.” 

Lynceus stared at Tchesmu’s kilt. Hypermnestra _tsked_ in annoyance. “The _mati-qaa_ he’s got on, for Set’s sake! You think he normally looks like this? It’s a semblance-guise.” 

“But why would a god—” 

Hypermnestra wasn’t listening to him now. She was too busy being angry with herself. “I knew there was something wrong with the other one, I _knew_ it. I could _smell_ deity about him, but it was all wrong somehow, it plainly wasn’t him, he was way too mortal—” 

The God gulped again, flashing back to Iaon’s jest. _Someone who’s had more god in him lately than’s good for him…_ Suddenly the innuendo wasn’t so funny. 

“Not one of our own gods. An interloper, an _Olympian._ But who from _that_ pantheon would bother to…” 

And she stopped. “Wait.” 

The God watched Hypermnestra’s eyes go wide again in a different way as understanding dawned. “It’s him,” she whispered. “The _Kekui-p-khart,_ the God that Gods Consult.” 

Lynceus’s mouth dropped open. “What? _Him?_ But why would he—” 

_“Horus,”_ she hissed. “Who else?” Hypermnestra’s face went feral. “They _told_ me Horus was getting desperate… that he was thinking about calling someone in from outside. We see how desperate now…” 

The God strained against the knots again. All his carefully-thought-out plans and counterplans—none of them had ever included this unlikeliest of variables: that anyone would actually be clever enough to sniff him out. Having got so far without interference, he’d allowed himself to be lulled into complacency about his enemies’ abilities. _Blind, I was blind—_

And the thought, slightly irrational in the face of what was about to happen to him: _Iaon is going to be_ so angry _at me—!_

“I suppose there’s no point at the moment in suggesting that if you free me and come along quietly, it’ll go easier for you,” the God said. 

“Oh please,” Hypermnestra said, and laughed softly. “I was warned about you. The clever trickster God who discerns everything… the one who sees with the mind, not the eye. Well, we’ll see if you saw _this.”_

She picked up the jug. “Get his mouth open,” she said. “Plenty enough here to give him a bigger dose than I’d thought he’d need when I thought he was mortal. Anyway, the other’s small, and he’s drunk enough to need much less, assuming he’s still alive. Come on, you!” 

The God’s renewed and more frantic struggles availed him nothing as Lynceus and Hypermnestra pinned him to the wall, as the demigoddess clamped his nose shut and the demigod pried his jaws open, and choking, spluttering, trying to spit, the God was nonetheless forced to swallow several gulps of the wine from the jug. The strength of the unmixed wine concealed the flavour of the drug somewhat, though not at all enough for it to be undetectable. _Perhaps at the wedding she was using a slightly different formulation, but the active ingredient’s the same._ He shook his head desperately as they let him go, trying to use the pain of his injuries to ward off the drug’s influence a little. _Time. Time is everything now. Stall. Give Iaon time. Keep them talking._

“Wouldn’t be too sure that what you gave your sisters is going to work the same way on me,” the God said, keeping his voice chilly and arrogant… that being the only weapon left to him now besides his mind. “Their heredity would’ve been all over the place. Even yours would be, compared to mine. I come of full Olympian blood on both sides… as you’ll be finding soon enough, to your regret.” 

“I’d say the regrets will be few enough,” Hypermnestra said. “And you brought this on yourself. Sneaking around here all by yourself…” 

“I’m not by myself,” the God said. “There are two of us.” 

Hypermnestra smiled at him in the flickering lamplight that was now all the light left in the corridor. “Not right now. And not for long. But why dwell on the negatives? Where’s that amazing, fantastic deduction your blogger’s always going on about? Go on, God-Who-Consults. You’ve got a few minutes yet. Surprise a girl.” 

Her air of utter unconcerned certainty chilled him, but nonetheless the God gave her his best bored look. “Not much to tell, really,” he said. “Though it’s a bit of a sad story, isn’t it? A fairy tale, yes. But one that went wrong. Fairy tales are always about the youngest daughter, after all. And you were the _oldest.”_

He narrowed his eyes at her. “What’s still not quite clear is who started it all—who first had the bright idea. Doubtless it’ll come out at the trial. But you were Danaus’s first daughter. He and the goddess who first wed him, they got together before this clever idea really got its wheels under it and started to run. Maybe he started becoming aware of your potential, in the dynastic sense, when you were still a baby. When his house was still routinely graced by your goddess-mother. With your coloring and your bone structure and your voice, I’d say it might have been… oh, perhaps Satet the Lady of the Punt Country, the Mistress of the Inundation?” 

Hypermnestra’s eyes widened. “That high-Nubian look, Ethiopian, the cheekbones, the long face, so elegant,” the God said, “so unmistakeable. In fact you actually favour my Mummy Euterpe somewhat.” He smiled that bright “don’t-flatter-yourself-too-hard” smile he kept for clients trading too heavily on their divine blood. 

“But it didn’t last, did it?” The God began speaking a bit more quickly, for he was starting to feel something odd going on in his gut, a kind of chill. “Because whether he came up with it himself or his darling brother gave it to him, your royal papa got very interested in the idea of what might be done with a houseful of children of semidivine blood. And soon it wasn’t just mama and papa and baby makes three. Soon there were more wives. And more daughters. Quite a lot more. And soon you were just one more in a crowd. The eldest, the one who always had to behave properly, the one who had to show the others the ropes and teach them how to handle it when they too realized they were just part of a crowd scene. Suddenly your doting papa wasn’t quite so doting any more.” 

Hypermnestra’s eyes were hard in the lamplight. “Ah, but there’s more,” the God said, more quickly now, for that chill inside him was starting to shift into a strange seeping warmth. “Whatever love she might have had for Danaus to start with, however she might have loved you, your divine Mama couldn’t allow herself to be lost in a scrum of squabbling mortal queens and workaday nymphs and hemisemidemigoddesses. After all, at the end of the day a god’s or goddess’s power is all about appearances. Those have to be kept up. And Satet’s not just some minor deity! She helps manage the _Nile,_ the source of the lives and livelihoods of millions of worshippers besides her own. So increasingly she made herself scarce. With the result that _you_ were marooned in the house of an increasingly uncaring papa, in the midst of a host of new mummies, an endless parade of them. As if any of them could match _yours,_ or truly ever be your mother! But _she_ was gone. When you finally realised that the old happy life was well and truly over and never coming back, when you knew that things would never get better but only worse, _that_ was when your heart truly broke. You were trapped alone and forever at the wrong end of a fairy tale, no rescuer ever coming, all the endings unhappy or someone else’s.” 

The God blinked, realising he was having trouble seeing in the dimness, his vision blurring. _Ridiculous—_ Except for the drug. _Unusual absorption mechanism,_ he thought. _Much faster than an opiate. Never mind, no time—_ “But then the plan for you all to get married to Aegyptus’s sons started to come together,” he said. “Quite rightly you were horrified. It would merely turn one unbearable situation into another one fifty times worse. And you thought and thought about how to escape from it… and realised suddenly that you had a weapon.” 

“Which tells me that you’re not as observant as you’re supposed to be, God-who-Consults,” Hypermnestra said, smiling slightly. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here now listening to your last testament. Your investigation needn’t have taken you further than the gates, for even Horus can see into the courtyard pool. You can’t have looked at all closely at our House before you entered. Didn’t you see the columns? The flowers painted on them?” 

“The lilies, you mean—” He was blinking again but his vision wouldn’t clear. 

“Oh no, _Kekui-p-khart._ A gap in your knowledge there, I fear! No lily’s that colour. Those are lotuses. Call the decoration a little indulgence of mine… a private joke.” The smile grew wider. “No one here has ever recognised them for what they are… the lotuses that grow so thick on that island where Odysseus’s men washed ashore, and yield the fruit of forgetfulness and pliancy. That lotus grows quite nicely here, if you know how to plant them… how to tend them… and what to do with the fruit afterwards. My lady mother knew, and taught me, when I was very young, Who knew, she said, when the knowledge of how to make nepenthe might be useful? For a woman’s got to look out for herself.” 

The God tried to think of an answer to that, and then was frightened to discover that for long moments he couldn’t. “At any rate, that was all such a long time ago,” Hypermnestra said, sounding cheerful again. “Better far to keep our minds on the present! And in retrospect it’s been a pleasure to have you here. A diversion!” She laughed. “‘Tchesmu.’ ‘The Hound.’” She shook her head. “After the spies told me to look out for you, I started following the stories about you to see what I’d be facing should you ever try to come here. It’s all true, what your little blogger writes. You so love being clever! And you had me fooled, I have to admit. Even if your disguise was just a sort of self-portrait in reverse—slave instead of free, burly instead of slim, homely instead of beautiful, dull instead of wise. Still not at all bad, really.” She chuckled. “As for your friend, though, your faithful chronicler, such a shame you’ve brought him along and doomed him too—” 

The God tried struggling against his bonds one more time, but to no avail. That sleepy warmth had crept down his nerves and taken away his mastery of his limbs. “Don’t know what you mean.” 

“Of course you do,” Hypermnestra said. “If I know who you are, how would I not know who _he_ is? True, no one knows your blogger’s name, he’s been careful enough about that, but his idiom’s pure Argive. This man, with his accent and the way he moves, the very smell of Argos hangs about him. The faithful companion, the warrior-that-was— it’s even funnier, now I know who he is, the way he tried so hard to act the master.” 

The ice running down the God’s veins at the thought of Iaon, sleeping peacefully and in immediate peril of his life, chilled that sleepy warmth for just a moment as he struggled again. _Iaon—!_ But it was to no avail. The languor had stolen his muscles and now was working on his mind: it was getting harder to think, harder to do anything but fear. 

“No matter, though. Your ‘master’ will soon be something you needn’t worry about any longer.” Hypermnestra smiled, a knowing and most ill-meaning smile. “He’ll be down among the Shades not long after you wind up wherever _you’re_ destined to go.” She cocked her head, thoughtful. “Maybe that’ll be the Shades too, if you’re lucky. After all, the odds of a mere grandson of Zeus making it into the Fields of the Blest aren’t all that strong. Especially with the kind of things _you’ve_ been up to. But won’t that be the best punishment for your meddling? To be able to see each other, speak to each other, but never _never_ touch again for all eternity…” 

The fear rose up to choke the God. Other fears he had that involved Iaon, but this one lay beneath all the others. He could still manage to feel fury at having his terrors so revealed, though, and he leveled his best look of immortal scorn on Hypermnestra. “And to think… you accused Master Eperitos… of saying a little too much.” He managed just one breath of laughter: it exhausted him. 

Hypermnestra laughed right back at him. “What? Why, it doesn’t matter a bit what I tell you! You won’t remember any of this. Not even after you’re dead.” 

His breathing was slowing. His heart was slowing. Thought was coming harder. _One last refuge,_ the God thought in desperation. _One place where I might be safe from this, safe from her, able to think of a way out_. He sought desperately within him for the way to his Palace of the Mind. _Keep her talking. Keep her talking—_

“Where pure Olympian blood is concerned…” the God said. And had to gasp for breath again. He found the path to the Palace of the Mind shrouded in mist. It was impossible to tell the way. “Don’t be so sure… that killing a God… will be all that easy.” In the thickening, darkening mist he staggered hopelessly forward, seeing no light, feeling the greyness curling in around him, behind his eyes, all through his mind. “We have… such an annoying tendency… to come _back.”_

“Enough,” Hypermnestra said. “Silence.” 

And the God’s tongue clove to the roof of his mouth and he was struck dumb. 

Near-total darkness. Silence, like a shroud. And in the silence, only Hypermnestra’s voice and that of the one she spoke to. 

“Emnet, finish with him. _Finish him!”_

“I _am_ finishing. Cut him loose, now. He’ll need his hands free for what comes next. Go on!” 

“But are you sure—” 

“Of course I’m sure! Don’t you see that already he can’t stir so much as a finger without my order? He’s a slave for real, now.” Amusement. “The play-act’s become the truth, and it’ll stay that way all the way to the Realms Below. And like a good slave he’s going to do just as he’s told. Just what his master tells him, in fact…” 

Vague horror creeping through that deepening darkness. Something terrible about to happen, but he couldn’t think what, couldn’t think how to stop it. _No. No. My fault._ _Can’t let this happen. Please no…_

“What? What are you going to do?” 

“Well, we can’t just turn them loose now to make their way home and have their accident on their own, the way we would have if they were really just a trader and his slave. We can’t take the chance that one or both of them will remember enough to tell Horus in the morning. We have to end this now!” 

_No._ No. _Have to do something, have to… have to…_

“And even if they fetch his _ba_ and his _ka_ straight back from the Boat of Millions of Years to tell their tale, even his _akh,_ assuming he’s got one—” 

“Doesn’t seem likely!” 

“Quite. What’ll he have to tell? No more than the others could have. He’ll tell them he had a weird dream or a nightmare, maybe something to do with being inside a semblance in the first place, and did what the dream told him. They’ll never work it out. Why would they? They’ll have their suspect right at hand, just as dead as he. Anyway, everyone knows he’s a bit mad! Maybe all his _cleverness_ broke his brain at last. No one would be a bit surprised.” 

…greyness getting darker, getting emptier. Voices fading into the background. Lonelier. _Alone in the dark, no, I was alone for so long and then not any more, I thought never again, but now it’s back, the alone, and it won’t protect me any more, he said_ he _was there to do that…_

“Husband, calm _down_ , don’t lose your nerve! It needs just a few minutes more. Too soon and he won’t obey completely, to death and past it. Just _wait!_ And after we deal with _him_ , no one will ever dare bother us again. He’s Horus’s last throw. And his best one, not that the dim birdbrained overachiever recognises that just yet. He’ll understand well enough at dawn, though, when he finds that _this_ one’s already on the boat to the Lands Beyond… _”_

“I don’t like it, what if the Greek…” 

“His Greek friend can’t help him now! One way or another the guards are dealing with him right this minute. If he’s still breathing when he comes back, after a swallow or two of this and a few words from me, dead or alive he’ll afterwards have no more of a tale to tell than this one—any more than the others did. Now give me that knife.” 

_…His Greek friend. His friend._ The voices, echoing in the emptiness that was becoming his mind, had done him this one kindness, reminding him of that one most important of all things as everything else slipped away. _My friend. My best friend. I didn’t have friends, I’ve just got one. Have to find him, have to warn him. Something terrible’s going to happen. Wake up, get away,_ run! 

With a shock of unwelcome sensation he realised that hands were touching his face, the wrong hands, too slim, too long, too cool, not the hands that had a right to be there. “Still struggling? You’re stronger than you look. But it won’t help. No use in resisting, already you feel you want to do as you’re told. Just do what you’re told and it’ll all be over.” 

And the gray, the gray swirled in, thicker and darker every moment, blanking away the world. “Nothing to see any more,” said the soft liquid voice, washing his will away like water washing away sand. “Nothing at all. Nothing but what I tell you to see, nothing to hear but my voice, telling you what to hear. You can’t struggle. You can’t move. You don’t want to. Just rest a moment, now. Just rest for a few breaths. Your last ones…” 

Desperate, going down under the flood of the other’s power and knowing he wouldn’t be able to come up again, the Consulting God cried out silently just once, with all his strength: just one word of anguished warning, the only word he could remember. 

_IAON…!_

But as the greyness behind his eyes went pitch-black, and the pouring words of that soft voice drowned the last gasps of his will, only silence answered. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on Egyptian soap, cosmic wanks, zizifon berries and nepenthe can be found [in this post](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/144356248512/till-we-have-cases-notes-on-chapter-35) at the [ Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Till We Have Cases](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2681123) by [derivational (crookedspoon)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedspoon/pseuds/derivational)




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